Elizabeth Joffrion is the director of Heritage Resources and associate professor at Western Washington University where she leads the Libraries' Special Collections, University Archives and Record Center, and the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies. Prior to this position, she was a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access where she coordinated the Preservation Assistance Grants Program. She has held professional positions at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, the North Carolina State Archives and the Historic New Orleans Collection, and has also taught courses on archives and special collections at Catholic University and Western Washington University. She received an MA in history from the University of New Orleans and a MLIS from the University of Maryland. Michèle Valerie Cloonan is a professor in the School of Library and Information Science, College of Organizational, Computational, and Information Sciences, and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University. She studied humanities at Bennington College (AB) and the University of Chicago (AM) and has an MS and a PhD in library and information science from the University of Illinois. She was a conservator at the Newberry Library, a preservation administrator at Brown University libraries, and a rare book curator at Smith College. At UCLA she was associate professor and chair of Information Studies.

In 2010, she was awarded the Paul Banks-Carolyn Harris Preservation Award from the American Library Association. Her book, Preserving Our Heritage: Perspectives from Antiquity to the Digital Age (ALA/Neal Schuman), received the 2016 Society of American Archivists' Preservation Publication Award. In 2018, she published The Monumental Challenge of Preservation: The Past in a Volatile World (MIT Press), winner of the University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation Book Prize. More recently, a case study book that she coauthored with Peter Botticelli, Martha Mahard, and Simmons students, Libraries, Archives, and Museums Today: Insights from the Field , was published by Rowman & Littlefield.