The core faculty for the master’s in Digital Curation and Management are pioneers in digital curation, rule-based system management, and digital forensics, and leaders in the fields of data mining, information collection design, and aggregated search systems. Read through these short biographies, watch the featured videos, and follow the links to more information about the experts you’ll be working with as you pursue your degree.
Dr. Helen Tibbo, Alumni Distinguished Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and Director of the Professional Science Master’s degree in Digital Curation and Management, teaches in the areas of archives and records management, digital preservation and access, appraisal, trustworthy repositories, and data curation. She has been the recipient of several million dollars in federal research funding for projects that have helped define digital curation best practices, particularly for government records and scientific research data. She has served as the president of the Society of American Archivists, the largest professional society in the field, and is an SAA Fellow, the highest honor bestowed on individuals by the organization. In 2001, she was named a Digital Pioneer by the Library of Congress.
Dr. Jaime Arguello, Associate Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), teaches courses and conducts research in the areas of information retrieval, data mining, and machine learning. His main area of research is aggregated search, where the goal is to develop search systems that integrate results from multiple independent sources. Dr. Arguello develops algorithms and evaluation methodologies for deciding which sources to select and how to display them. His most recent research studies how users interact with aggregated search displays and how differences in display affect users’ expectations and behaviors. His second main area of research focuses on search assistance, where the goal is to develop interactions to help search engine users working on complex tasks. His work has received support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and he won the Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2017.
Dr. Melanie Feinberg, Associate Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), is a classificationist whose research approach combines design with the humanities. Her work focuses on learning how to read and write databases to complement our engineering and mining of them. She received her PhD in 2008 from the iSchool at the University of Washington; she has a master’s from the iSchool at Berkeley (2004) and was an undergraduate at Stanford (1992). In her professional career before returning to academia, she was a content strategist and technical editor, working at companies such as Apple Computer, Scient, and PeopleSoft.
Dr. Christopher (Cal) Lee is a Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and recent editor of The American Archivist. He teaches archival administration, records management, digital curation, understanding information technology for managing digital collections, and digital forensics. Dr. Lee’s primary area of research is curation of digital collections. He is currently Principal Investigator for BitCurator NLP and was PI of BitCurator Access and BitCurator, projects that have developed and disseminated open-source digital forensics tools for use by libraries, archives, and museums (LAMS). He is also co-PI for OSSArcFlow, a project led by SILS and the Educopia Institute, to research, devise, and test strategies for implementing three leading open source software (OSS) technologies.
Dr. Arcot Rajasekar is a Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and a Chief Scientist at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). Previously he was at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, leading the Data Grids Technology Group. He has been involved in research and development of data grid middleware systems for over a decade and is a lead originator behind the concepts in the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and the integrated Rule Oriented Data Systems (iRODS), two premier data grid middleware developed by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments Group. A leading proponent of policy-oriented, large-scale data management, Dr. Rajasekar has several research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Archives, National Institute of Health and other federal agencies.
