Scholars and the Everywhere Library

Dan Cohen

“Scholars and the Everywhere Library”

September 24, 10:30-noon
Smithsonian Institution Ripley Center, Lecture Hall, Room 3027

1100 Jefferson Drive,
SW, Washington, D.C.

 Dan Cohen is the second speaker in the Libraries’ 2009 Lecture Series. Cohen holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton, a master’s from Harvard, and a doctorate from Yale. His lecture will pose the questions: How can libraries best help researchers, when the very conception of the “library” for most scholars has changed from a physical location to a wide variety of online resources? Does this transition to the digital realm open up new avenues of research and new services that libraries can provide to meet those research needs? Cohen will speak about new possibilities for search, discovery, recommendations, and analysis that a modern library might be able to provide to the next generation of scholars. There will be a webcast of the lecture.

Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Center for History and New Media. His own research is in European and American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing. He is co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History. He is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship.

At the Center for History and New Media he co-directed, among other projects, the September 11 Digital Archive and Echo (Exploring and Collecting History Online),a directory to 5,000+ websites concerning the history of science, technology, and industry. He has developed software for scholars, teachers, and students, including the popular Zotero  research tool, and received IMLS and Alfred P. Sloan funding for the development of Omeka. For more information, check out Cohen’s blog. For questions about attending the lecture, please contact Marcia Adams.—Liz O'Brien