After earning master's degrees in history from the University of Virginia and in social history from Carnegie Mellon University, she went on to earn a doctorate in library science from the University of Pittsburgh. She has taught courses in the introduction to archives; archival access and advocacy; management of records and information resources; and intellectual freedom. Her research focuses on government archives and the relationships among issues of access, privacy and collective memory. Author of articles on the management of medical records of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, her most recent study, "The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Access and Control over Controversial Records." was published in Political Pressure and the Archival Record.