Simmons College

Ben Abrahamse was born and raised in Long Beach, California. After earning a Bachelor's in Religious Studies from Macalester College (St. Paul, Minnesota) in 1994, he came to Cambridge to earn a Master's degree at the Harvard Divinity School. It was here that he was exposed to academic librarianship, beginning as an evening shelver at Tozzer Library, and working his way through graduate school as a technical services assistant at several Harvard libraries. He moved on to a full-time cataloging position at the Weissman Preservation Center of Harvard University Libraries, and then took a position as serials copy cataloger at the MIT Libraries. He earned his Master's degree in Library and Information Science from the School of Information Science at McGill University in 2008, and has been serving as the Head of Serials Cataloging at MIT since then.

Ben is interested in the history and theory of cataloging, in metadata management, and in the cataloging of continuing resources and complex collections. In addition to teaching at Simmons GSLIS, he has taught information organization at McGill SIS. His writings have been published in The Marginal: the McGill School of Information Studies Student Journal and in The Serials Librarian.

He currently lives in Watertown with his wife Trina, his dog Snicket, and two cats named Dizzy and Pig. Ben can be reached at: babraham@mit.edu.

Benjamin Abrahamse's Resume