Ed Summers is Lead Developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), University of Maryland. Ed has been working for two decades helping to build connections between libraries and archives and the larger communities of 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.

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.

Before joining the Library of Congress Ed was a software developer at Follett Corporation where he designed and implemented knowledge management applications to support their early e-book efforts. He was the fourth employee at CheetahMail in New York City, where he led the design of their data management applications. And prior to that Ed worked in academic libraries at Old Dominion University, the University of Illinois and Columbia University where he was mostly focused on metadata management applications.

Ed likes to use experiments to learn about the Web and digital curation. Examples of this include his work with Wikipedia 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. Some of these experiments are social, such as his role in creating the code4lib community, which is an international, cross-disciplinary group of hackers, designers and thinkers in the digital library space.