Alexandra Chassanoff will be joining the MIT Libraries as the software curation postdoctoral fellow, part of the Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Chassanoff is a doctoral candidate at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her dissertation examines how historians are using digital archival photographs as forms of evidence. Her broad research interests concern how we understand and evaluate visual information as meaningful in the digital age. In particular, she is interested in conceptualizing the use of visual information as an emergent practice.

Chassanoff is currently the project manager at BitCurator Access, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative to develop open-source software providing web-based and local access to born-digital content held on disk images. From September 2011 until October 2014, she was the project manager at the BitCurator Project, which consisted of conceptualizing and building an open-source digital forensics software environment for archivists working with born-digital materials.

At MIT, Chassanoff will inform the Libraries about immediate and long-term implications of collecting and curating software and of providing software curation services to our community. She will demonstrate potential selection, preservation, and service strategies through use cases and prototypes that address the breadth of software curation issues and create a model that applies digital curation principles and practice to software.

Chassanoff, who received an MS in Information Science from UNC Chapel Hill and a BA from Brandeis University, is a self-described “activist, metadata enthusiast, musician, and film and record nerd.”