Richard Marciano visits Indiana for talk on archival education and computation archival science
By Maggie McDonald
On September 22, Dr. Richard Marciano, Professor at University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, joined the Luddy School to discuss the emergence of Computational Archival Science (CAS) as a transdisciplinary field concerned with the application of computational methods and resources to large-scale records and archives processing and discusses a number of collaborations and projects related to the computational treatments of justice, human rights and cultural heritage records.
Marciano is the founding director of the Advanced Information Collaboratory (AIC), which focuses on exploring the opportunities and challenges of “disruptive technologies” for archives and records management (digital curation, machine learning, AI, etc.), and leveraging the latest technologies to unlock the hidden information in massive stores of records. He recently launched the AIC “FARM” Initiative on the Future of Archives and Records Management, which leverages advances in Computational Archival Science (CAS) through the mapping of Computational Thinking to Archival Science using AI, Machine Learning, and CAS.
He is also a professor at the U. Maryland iSchool, and an affiliate professor at the U. Maryland Computer Science Dept. and Institute for Systems Research at the School of Engineering. Prior to that, he was a Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 6 years. He was also a Research Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for 13 years. His research interests center on digital curation, digital preservation, sustainable archives, and big data. He is also the 2017 recipient of the Emmett Leahy Award for “outstanding and sustained work in digital records and information management”. He holds degrees in Avionics and Electrical Engineering, a Master’s and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Iowa, and he conducted a postdoc in Computational Geography.