We are pleased to announce that Thomas Padilla, Deputy Director, Archiving and Data Services at the Internet Archive, will deliver the opening keynote address at the NISO Plus 2024 conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, February 13, at 9:30 am.
Internationally recognized for his leadership in promoting responsible stewardship and computational use of memory organization collections as data, Thomas earned his MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has held positions at Michigan State University; the University of California, Santa Barbara (where he served as the UC system’s first humanities data curator), and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. For his ground-breaking work on collections as data, he was awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant (2016) as well as a Mellon Grant (2018) and was named a Library Journal “Mover and Shaker (Digital Developer)” in 2020.
Thomas has also become a sought-after voice on the role of AI in libraries and scholarly communications. He was the 2019 Practitioner Researcher-in-Residence at OCLC, where he authored the study “Responsible Operations: Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries.” He has also spoken widely on the topic, most recently delivering the keynote “A Mutualistic View of AI in the Library or a Continuation of Craft” at the DARIAH-EU annual event on June 7 in Budapest.
Thomas has more than a decade of experience developing, consulting, publishing, presenting, and teaching on responsible stewardship and computational use of memory organization collections and digital strategy. He is Advisory Board Member, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media; National Advisory Board Member, Opioid Industry Documents Archive; and Advisory Board Member, The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections.
“Thomas’s work has given him valuable insights into the current state—and future—of scholarly communications and the role of the library, particularly in the context of accelerating technological change.” said Jason Griffey, Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO. “We’re looking forward to hearing from him during the opening keynote at NISO Plus.”
