Three recipients of the 2017 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum Fellowships have ties to the iSchool. Jane Kelly, an MS/LIS student in the Leep program, and Nushrat Khan (MS '16) were awarded DLF Forum Fellowships for Students and New Professionals. Richard J. Urban (PhD '12) was named a KRESS+DLF Forum Fellow. The awards recognize the recipients' dedication to their work and the field of digital libraries.
Kelly is the historical and special collections assistant at the Harvard Law School Library. "The work I'm most excited about these days is the HLS Community Capture Project, a grant-funded project that I'm managing to prototype a tool to facilitate born-digital collecting from student organizations at Harvard Law School," she said. "When I'm not working on that, you'll likely find me with researchers in our reading room, managing our print collection of institutional, student, and faculty publications, or doing a little web archiving. I'm interested in the ways in which we can leverage technology in archives and the impact this work has on the people and communities who engage with archival material as donors, archives staff, researchers, and in roles we’ve yet to imagine."
A fellow at the North Carolina State University Libraries, Khan is cross-appointed in the Digital Library Initiatives and on the linked data initiative with the Acquisitions and Discovery Department. "I am not only passionate about learning new languages, but also enjoy learning new technologies and [exploring] their usage for research and scholarship. As a new professional, my goal is to make scholarly digital resources more accessible to users with improved systems by integrating research skills with creativity and innovation. I am particularly interested in digital humanities, scholarly communication, and educational informatics. DLF Forum has been a great venue for me to learn from and engage with other professionals since I first attended in 2015, and I am excited to continue my involvement this year as well," said Khan.
Urban is the digital asset manager and strategist at the Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG). "I am currently managing the transition to a new digital asset management system that will handle digital representations of our collections, events, and programs," he said. "With the new system serving as a firm foundation, I will be guiding CMoG's efforts to make our collections available to new audiences online. We also recognize that management of our digital assets is only the first step towards a more robust digital preservation plan. I look forward all that the 2017 DLF Forum has to offer on sharing our collections as data, digital preservation, and our representations of cultural memory. Following on the heels of DLF, I will be celebrating the Museum Computer Network’s 50 years as a community where people and ideas cross-pollinate."
The 2017 DLF Forum will be held on October 23-25 in Pittsburgh.