Dennis Meissner is the Interim Deputy Director for Programs at the Minnesota Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. Most of his archival career has focused on the arrangement, description, and the larger management of archival materials, including their discovery and use in networked environments. He has participated in a number of SAA and international efforts to that end and presently serves on SAA's Encoded Archival Context Working Group, which is developing a global standard for encoding archival authority records.

Dennis has worked closely with the design, delivery, and management of electronic finding aids to archival collections, and has participated in numerous U.S. and international working groups in the development and delivery of collection descriptions and the standards that underlie them, including chairing RLG's EAD Best Practices Working Group. He has consulted and presented workshops on archival processing and description and has published largely in those areas, but also in the area of business records management.

In 2003, He and Mark Greene (American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming) were awarded a yearlong NHPRC Archival Research Fellowship to study archival processing expectations and backlogs in U.S. repositories and to recommend changes to existing practices. That research led to an article in the American Archivist, "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing," which has since enjoyed a strong uptake within the archival community.