Rhiannon Bettivia, who joined the faculty in Spring 2020, earned her PhD from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching areas are digital stewardship, media preservation, and metadata. Bettivia's research blends information science with media, heritage, and cultural studies. She looks at how political and governance concerns are built into technological infrastructures with a focus on digital cultural heritage, video games, and Semantic Web platforms. Her grant work and publications examine areas such as digital preservation of media in state and private institutions in the US and Europe and heritage aggregation projects such as Europeana and DPLA.
Education
- PhD, Library and Information Science, from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- MS, Teaching, from Pace University
- BA, Philosophy, from Barnard College
Courses
- LIS 444 Archiving and Preserving Digital Media
- LIS 445 Metadata
Research/Special Projects
Bettivia's research follows a few interrelated themes of metadata and digital platforms. She is working with Dr. Elizabeth Stainforth (Leeds, UK) on a project examining digital cultural heritage platforms, particularly those that aggregate metadata about museum and archive holdings. They are examining how governmental politics of state identity are built into digital infrastructures and data models. Relatedly, she studies Semantically-enabled tools such as search engine knowledge panels and how they gather, use, and display metadata. She also is researching how metadata is used to fix live craft practices for the purposes of documentation for digital preservation through UNESCO World Heritage guidelines and for use in e-commerce platforms, with a focus on artisans in Indonesia. Please contact her if you are interested in working with her on these or related projects.