Recognizing four outstanding LEADING Fellows, selected into the highly competitive 2021 Drexel University LEADING program (Jun.-Dec. 2021) and affiliated with the AI-Collaboratory!

LEADING (see: https://cci.drexel.edu/mrc/leading) focuses on preparing a nationwide cohort of  LIS doctoral students and early to mid-career librarians for data science endeavors. It stands for LIS Education and Data Science Integrated Network Group, and it is supported by an $887K grant from Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The four Fellows are:

  • UMD iSchool Doctoral students and AIC Research Fellows: Lori Perine & Jennifer Proctor, who will intern for 6 months with OCLC Research and Development (mentors: Devon Smith, Lead Engineer & Jenny Toves, Software Architect)
  • Archives & Library Professionals: Lencia Beltran (Digital Archivist from Emporia State) & Emily Ping O’Brien (Digital Repository and Metadata Librarian at Worcester Polytechnic Institute), who will intern for 6 months with the AI-Collaboratory at the UMD iSchool (mentors: Greg Jansen, Richard Marciano)
Lori Perine Lori Perine will work with OCLC Research  on the Metadata Record Similarity: Identification and Clustering project. The goal is to use string similarity and match-scoring approaches to develop an algorithm and implementation that can identify match candidates or small fuzzy clusters for MARC records.
Jennifer Proctor Jennifer Proctor will work with OCLC Research on the Detecting Missing Marks (diacritics) in Text project.  The goal is to examine instances of missing diacritic marks among title fields in WorldCat MARC records and analyze the associated bibliographic records to identify predictive patterns for this occurrence.
Lencia Beltran
Lencia Beltran

Emily Ping O'Brien
Emily Ping O’Brien
Lencia Beltran and Emily Ping O’Brien will work with the Advanced Information Collaboratory (AIC) on the Revisiting the WWII Japanese American Incarceration Camp Experience: Spatial and Temporal Representations from the “Inside Out” project. The goal is to analyze Densho data records to identify people who were in camps, how they lived, and how they connected in order to resist and endure these circumstances.

LEADING is led by Dr Jane Greenberg at Drexel University’s MRC Metadata Research Center at the College of Computing & Informatics (CCI).
The AI-Collaboratory is one of  the 14 LEADING member nodes and serves as project mentoring site.
The AIC is a research network which explores the opportunities and challenges of disruptive technologies for archives and records management (see in particular AIC’s FARM Initiative on the “Future of Archives and Records Management”).