Bio

I am a senior software engineer on the Infrastructure Development Team within Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS), a department within the Stanford Libraries. My focus is on the development, design, and maintenance of digital library services, especially the Stanford Digital Repository. As part of this work, I also help to coordinate the community-based development of SDR and its components, working extensively with open-source software and projects. I love working for an organization with a cultural memory-based mission, and hope that I continue to do so for the rest of my career.

Prior to this role, I held a grant-funded position, also at Stanford, as Technical Manager of the Hydra-in-a-Box project. My primary role at that time was as the technical lead for a distributed, multi-institutional development team working to design, build, and deploy a feature-replete and “turnkey” Samvera Community (née “Hydra Project”)-based digital repository solution.

I earned an MLIS degree in 2006 from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and enjoyed a brief stint in the Professional Master of Arts program in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington-Seattle, where I was interested in applying techniques of natural language processing to metadata extraction from full-text digital collections. My undergraduate degree, also from Rutgers, was in linguistics and philosophy, capped by an honors thesis on syntactic and semantic theories of pronouns and reflexives in Germanic languages.

My last job was at Penn State University as their digital library architect. What does that mean? In that role, I was primarily responsible for designing technical architecture for library and institutional data, providing vision and strategy for the development thereof, and building a development team to implement it. Previously, I worked at the Library of Congress, on a team developing digital repository tools, processes, and architecture supporting initiatives such as the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the World Digital Library, and Chronicling America.

Prior to that, I worked for Princeton University digital library, the University of Washington Libraries (2005-6) and the Rutgers University Libraries (1999-2005) as a systems administrator, project coordinator, and digital library/repository hacker. Before that wore a bunch of hats for a small Internet service provider during the mid-late ’90s dot-com boom. As an undergrad, a work-study program placed me in the Archibald S. Alexander Library at Rutgers, where my love for libraries was kindled.

Among my research and development interests are data quality; community-building; digital curation; digital preservation and archiving; digital libraries/repositories; web services; identifier persistence; roles of trust, authority, and skepticism in information behavior; and library technology.