Co-Secretary, BHL Members’ Council
Project Manager and Museum Liaison, Ernst Mayr Library and Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Harvard University.
Joe’s work at Harvard is focused primarily on management of library and museum digitization projects for preservation, integration with MCZbase, the MCZ specimen database, creation of online digital collections, and contribution of library and archival holdings to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). He is keenly interested in the concept of “collections as data”, and is currently working with colleagues to incorporate crowdsourced transcriptions of scientific field notes and correspondence into BHL to expose the data contained therein for text mining and computational analysis. Prior to his arrival at Harvard, Joe worked for 25 years at the joint library of the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MBLWHOI Library) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. While there, he developed a project to digitize the 3000-specimen marine algae collection of the MBLWHOI Library Herbarium. He holds a Master of Liberal Arts degree in Museum Studies from Harvard Extension School (2014), and a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Framingham State University (1980).