Alexandra Chassanoff, a doctoral candidate in the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), will join MIT Libraries on October 1 as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) postdoctoral fellow in software curation. In her new role, Chassanoff will lead an investigation to inform the libraries about immediate and long-term implications of collecting and curating software and of providing software curation services to its community of users.
A 2009 graduate of the Master of Science in Information Science (MSIS) program at SILS, Chassanoff recently defended her dissertation, which examines how and why historians have used digitized archival photographs as evidence. Her broader research interests concern how we understand and evaluate visual information as meaningful in the digital age.
While earning her MSIS, Chassanoff served as a Carolina Digital Curation fellow and contributed to the development of the Carolina Digital Repository. From September 2011 until October 2014, she was the project manager at the BitCurator Project, which conceptualized and built an open-source digital forensics software environment for archivists working with born-digital materials. She is currently the project manager at BitCurator Access, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative to develop tools to assist collecting institutions (libraries, archives, and museums) in providing web-based and local access to born-digital materials held on disk images.
