About

Hello! I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina and a Faculty Affiliate at UNC’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Previously, I was a Research Program Officer at Educopia Institute and a CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT Libraries.

I study the social contexts and infrastructural practices in which different communities (software preservationists, archival practitioners, historian scholars) use digital artifacts as meaningful information. From the design of software curation frameworks to the analysis of sociotechnical characteristics that impede born-digital workflows, my research program advances an interdisciplinary understanding of the impact and consequences of the computational turn on the enduring cultural heritage record.

In my role as a Research Program Officer at The Educopia Institute, I was the Project Manager for OSSArcFlow, an IMLS-funded initiative to synchronize born-digital workflows across collecting institutions. As a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s CREOS / Program on Informatics   I spent two years leading an investigation into how research libraries can support software preservation services.  As a PhD student at UNC SILS, I helped to develop the BitCurator environment, on open source archival software to assist in digital preservation activities.  My dissertation explored the information-making experiences of historians using digital photographs as evidence.  This work prompted an ongoing exploration and commitment to developing interpretive methods for studying how we experience born-digital information. For the past decade, I have worked in embedded settings with library technologists, practitioners, and faculty on the design and development of digital cultural heritage infrastructure. These grant-funded, applied research initiatives have included the following: