Since 1991, Barbara Aikens has served as Chief of Collections Processing at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, with primary responsibility for all archival processing, arrangement, preservation, description, and the creation of EAD (Encoded Archival Description) electronic finding aids.

Since 2005 Ms. Aikens has been a member of a core team of staff that developed the Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections - a large scale digitization initiative tht has received national recognition as a highly successful model for efficiently integrating archival processing workflows into archival digitization workflows. The system repurposes the EAD finding aid to serve as both the descriptive metadata and online navigational tool for the digitized content.

Ms. Aikens serves on the Smithsonian Collections Advisory Committee and is incoming Chair of the Smithsonian Institution Archives and Special Collections Council. Ms. Aikens planned and is currently directing a pan-institutional project to fully implement EAD across the Smithsonian, create a shared EAD finding aid database repository, and work with the central OCIO office to develop a dedicated web portal for archival resources at the Smithsonian.

Ms. Aikens received her M.A. in Public History from West Virginia University in 1983, and a B.A. in American History in1982. She is active professionally and a member of the Society of American Archivists and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, regularly presenting professional papers at conferences.