Emily R. Novak brings curiosity, commitment, and resourcefulness to her role as Deputy Director of Countway’s Center for the History of Medicine. In 2009, she was hired as the Center’s Collections Services Archivist, appointed Head, Collections Services in 2013, and in 2016, she took on the role of Deputy Director.
As Deputy Director, Emily provides leadership and strategic oversight for acquisitions, collections services, records management, and research and instruction. She collaborates with her extraordinary Countway colleagues to advance the Library’s service mission to the Harvard Longwood Campus. She believes acquiring special collections, archives, and museum holdings and making them accessible has never been more critical to ensuring the evidence of how medical and public health disciplines change over time is preserved, and that the records that speak to the social and structural determinants of health survive to inform present and future decision-making.
Emily’s professional interests and publications focus on innovating and improving access to history of medicine and public health collections (especially ones that pose ethical concerns related to privacy). Other areas of focus include integrated approaches to special collections, archives, and museum management, and holdings assessments for special collections and archives.
Emily is a former President of the Medical Heritage Library, Inc., a non-profit that operated through 2024, that coordinated the mass digitization of resources in the history of medicine, public health, and the health sciences for free and open access and that created opportunities for researchers to engage with digitized history of medicine content. As Co-chair of the SAA-ACRL/RBMS Joint Task Force on the Development of Standardized Holdings Counts and Measures, she worked with a team of archivists to produce Guidelines for Standardized Holdings Counts and Measures for Archival Repositories and Special Collections Libraries, an SAA-approved standard. She has also served the Librarians, Archivists and Museum Professionals in the History of the Health Sciences (LAMPHHS) in a variety of roles and is currently the Co-chair of the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM).
Prior to 2009, Emily worked as a librarian and archivist for Historic New England and as an archivist for the Information and Archival Services Division of the Winthrop Group, Inc., where she surveyed, arranged, and described collections for a wide variety of corporate and nonprofit clients including the Architectural Research Institute/Beverly Willis Papers Project, Caterpillar, Inc., March of Dimes, Muhammad Ali Center, New York Life Insurance Company (New York, N.Y.), the United Nations, and WGBH Boston. Emily holds both an MLS and a BA in English Literature and Teacher Education from the State University of New York at Albany. You can reach Emily via email.
