Ed Summers

Ed has been working for two decades helping bridge the worlds of libraries and archives with the World Wide Web. During that time Ed has worked in academia, start-ups, corporations and the government. He is interested in the role of open source software, community development and open access to enable digital curation. Ed has a MS in Library and Information Science and a BA in English and American Literature from Rutgers University. He is also a PhD student in the UMD iSchool where he studies web archiving practices.

Prior to joining MITH Ed helped build the Repository Development Center (RDC) at the Library of Congress. In that role he led the design and implementation of the NEH funded National Digital Newspaper Program’s web application, which provides access to 8 million newspapers from across the United States. He also helped create the Twitter archiving application that has archived close to 500 billion tweets (as of September 2014). Ed created LC’s image quality assurance service that has allowed curators to sample and review over 50 million images. He served as a member of the Semantic Web Deployment Group at the W3C where he helped standardize SKOS, which he put to use in implementing the initial version of LC’s Linked Data service.

Ed likes to use experiments to learn about the web and digital curation. Examples of this include his work with Wikimedia Labs on Wikistream (which helps visualize the rate of change on Wikipedia); and congressedits, which allows Twitter users to follow edits being made to Wikipedia from the Congress. You can find out more about what Ed is up to by following his blog, his Twitter stream, and his software development activity on Github.

Ed studies and works with the Web as a sociotechnical system, with particular interest in its evolving architecture and practices of curation and preservation.