The ISAW Library welcomes Jasmine Smith and Christian Casey

Jasmine Smith, ISAW Asst. Research Scholar, Digtial Initiatives The ISAW Library is very excited to welcome Jasmine Smith and Christian Casey to the ISAW Library team.

Jasmine started in the ISAW Library this past July as our second Asst. Research Scholar, Digital Initiatives, a post previously held by Patrick Burns, who is now doing fantastic work as the ACLS postdoctoral fellow in the University at Austin’s Quantitative Criticism Lab. Jasmine has a background in archaeology and comes to us from the University of Michigan School of Information, where she completed her MSI with a thesis that centered on the archaeological database used by a team excavating in Abydos, Egypt.

And when it rains, it pours! We are also very excited (and incredibly lucky) to announce that Christian Casey started in the ISAW Library this September as our first-ever postdoctoral CLIR Fellow. The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the NYU Division of Libraries generously sponsored three recent PhDs to work as postdoctoral fellows in three departments of the NYU Division of Libraries (in addition to Christian at ISAW, Aditya Ranganath is working on geospatial data curation and preservation in Data Services, and Azure Stewart in the Bern Dibner Library at the Tandon School of Engineering). Christian Casey, CLIR postdoctoral Fellow

Christian comes to ISAW from Brown University, where he recently earned his PhD in Egyptology as well as Masters in Applied Mathematics. He has extensive research and teaching experience in quantitative and computational approaches to ancient studies and this past summer he worked on digital epigraphy projects at the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown.

Both Jasmine and Christian will have core responsibilities for continuing the development of ISAW's growing portfolio of digital initiatives, including:

• digital collections (AWDL, Digital Central Asian Archaeology, Digital South Caucasus Collection);
• digital and metadata projects (e.g., ISAW linked bibliography, uploading and linking the papyri in NYU Special Collections and The Morgan Library to papyri.info, etc.) publishing and scholarly communications program (e.g., ISAW Papers and ISAW books, which are partnerships with DLTS and the NYU Press);
• instructional offerings (the team-taught "Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World" [ISAW-GA 3024-001], classes on Zotero, historical GIS, Pleiades and linked open data in ancient studies, etc.); and
• public programming (Ancient MakerSpaces, conferences like the recent Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean).

We are also hoping to make good use of Jasmine's interest and experience in archaeology to do more as a Library with archaeological data, especially as ISAW produces a tremendous quantity of it.

You will be hearing from both Jasmine and Christian themselves in this space about their first months at ISAW and the sorts of projects they are working on, but if you happen to be in the building and have not met them yet, please stop by the third floor to say hello. You can also reach them via email at jas.smith@nyu.edu and cdc6@nyu.edu.