Marie Williams Chant’s entrepreneurial work centers on Bitstreams Club, where she develops forward-looking initiatives that connect creatives — including artists, activists and journalists — with practical tools to preserve their born-digital legacies. Recognizing that many creatives only consider digital preservation after a crisis or loss, she built Bitstreams Club as a hub for proactive education, accessible resources and community-driven support. Her projects often emerge from real needs she has observed in the field, including her pilot work with The Feminist Institute in New York, where she collaborated with feminist artists on born-digital legacy planning and web archiving strategies.

Her entrepreneurial approach is grounded in her graduate studies at the Information School, studies which provided the technical foundation and leadership training that now fuel her business’s development. One of Bitstreams Club’s flagship emerging programs is focused on helping journalists preserve their born-digital work. This program originated as an independent study with Associate Professor Nicholas Weber during Chant’s final quarter at the Information School, and the resulting annotated bibliography continues to serve as the intellectual backbone of her program design.

Chant continues to consult part-time with cultural organizations through Bitstreams Club, offering fractional management and new program development that supports sustainable execution of digital initiatives. Her projects frequently involve digital preservation assessments, digital collections strategy, repository development and planning frameworks for new grant-making programs. Beyond Bitstreams Club, she serves as the digital archivist at the Museum of Glass and as guest faculty teaching Introduction to Digital Preservation at the Information School.