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Thomas Padilla to Keynote NISO Plus 2024

Thomas Padilla to Keynote NISO Plus 2024

December 2023

Information Industry News

Baltimore, MD | December 14, 2023

We are pleased to announce that Thomas Padilla will deliver the opening keynote address, “States of Open AI,”  at the NISO Plus 2024 conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, February 13, at 9:30 am (https://niso.plus).

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 is currently Deputy Director, Archiving and Data Services at the Internet Archive. He 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.

About NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.