Trudi Abel is a cultural historian and archivist at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Senior Fellow in Information Science & Studies at Duke University. She founded the Digital Durham Project (digitaldurham.duke.edu) in 1999. This digital repository provides a range of maps, photographs, manuscript letters, printed matter, ephemera and 1880 census data for Durham, North Carolina.
She currently directs the Archives Alive initiative at the Rubenstein Library and “Teaching with Archives,” a Duke Summer Doctoral Academy seminar. She frequently teaches the Digital Durham seminar with Victoria Szabo.
Abel's scholarship focuses on the history of the book in America--particularly the rise of juvenile popular fiction in the early twentieth century and e-books and price fixing in the early twenty-first century.
