Irina Schmid is an instructor and digital collection archivist at The American University in Cairo. Before becoming an archivist, she worked as a pharmacist in the Railway Hospital in Russia. After moving to the United Kingdom, she diversified by entering the master of arts records and archives management (international) course at University College, London with the desire to become an information specilist. She specialized in logistics, inventory and audit, archival appraisal, organization, digitisation, and preservation of modern and historical collections and worked for a number of years in educational and business organisations in the United Kingdom and in Singapore.

She enjoys preserving and shaping historical records, and creating tools to improve access to archived information. Moreover, she believes that building partnerships inside and outside organizations can help raise and expand the profile of archives. 

Her big interest is the management of large amounts of data and the management of knowledge. She sees knowledge as a critical component for addressing organisational needs and preserving processes and experiences. For a long time records managers and archivists have been perceived solely as curators of data. The challenge now is to move beyond this. She wants to explore opportunities for recording data as knowledge, and how records throughout any organization can become sources of knowledge to be used in enterprise-wide organizational learning.