Biography

Angela T. Spinazze is an information architect, liaison, and bridge-builder. Her work focuses on smart approaches to managing the vast quantities of information that museums, archives, and cultural heritage organizations generate. She helps organizations manage their collections and share their stories.

Angela began her career in the Annual Programs Department of The Art Institute of Chicago where she produced direct mail campaigns, planned special events, and worked with volunteers. In 1991, her focus shifted to the collections side of the museum where she was part of the first comprehensive physical inventory team, a project that also included the design and development of the museum's first database of collections information. Angela managed the conversion of the index card file (representing approximately 150,000 works of art) into electronic format and she helped develop the application architecture and user interface.

From 1993-1997, Angela served as Director of Marketing for a leading collections management systems developer. In this capacity, she managed all marketing and sales activities world-wide, co-developed two Windows-based applications for collections information management, and facilitated implementation and training programs.

Angela founded ATSPIN consulting in 1997. Since then, she has worked with institutions worldwide on integrating technologies into the museum ecology to improve access to collections information for both staff and public audiences. Angela has worked with a variety of institutions, both large and small including the Walker Art Center, Mystic Seaport, Québec Museum Consortium, Este Court Archive, University of Notre Dame, Society of Architectural Historians, Museum of the Moving Image, Haggerty Art Museum, and others.

Angela led programming activities for the CIMI Consortium for several years. During that time she served as editor for several technical user guides produced by the Consortium for the museum community; she led professional development seminars on topics such as Dublin Core, digitization, and collection level description standards. In addition, she ran the Handscape project that was among the first studies to examine the effectiveness of mobile devices in museums.

Angela has written grants for online collections access projects, mentored young professionals, and managed projects for institutions that include the development of new policies for collections cataloguing, management, and related publishing efforts.

Angela is an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Advanced Academic Programs, Master of Arts in Museum Studies. She received a Bachelors of Arts from Miami University in 1986 and a Masters of Arts in 19th-20th Century Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1992.