Episode 48: Derek Mosley on Peer Mentorship, Retention, and Community Archives

Derek T. Mosley is the Archives Division Manager at Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in Atlanta, Georgia. He has held this role since 2016. He has previously worked at the Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library and the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Mosley’s enthusiastic and engaged leadership has shaped the archival profession on local and national levels. He has served on conference planning committees, election committees, and scholarship committees for several organizations. He is a founding member of the Atlanta Black Archives Alliance, a group that strives to educate Black communities on the importance of documenting their stories, and he was a member of the 2019 cohort of the Archives Leadership Institute.

In 2021, he received the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board Award for Excellence in Documenting Georgia's History. In 2023, Mosley was inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, the highest honor the organization bestows. In 2024 Derek was elected as the Vice-President and President-Elect of the Society of American Archivists.

He graduated from Simmons University with an M.S. in Archives Management and Morehouse College with a B.A. in History.