Dr. Salwa Ismail is the Associate University Librarian for Discovery and Access at Harvard Library, reporting to the Vice President for the Harvard Library and serving as a member of the library’s senior leadership team. She provides strategic, collaborative leadership for services that enable people and systems to discover and access Harvard’s vast collections, and she oversees units responsible for content acquisition, digitization, description, access, and user experience research.
Prior to Harvard, Dr. Ismail served as the Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology and Associate CIO at UC Berkeley Library, where she led a broad portfolio of digital and technology initiatives, including the university’s Google Books Partnership and the UC North Regional high-density storage facility. Earlier in her career, she held leadership roles at Georgetown University Library and Florida Atlantic University Libraries, where she provided leadership for digital services, including digital scholarship, data services, computing, innovative technology spaces, interface design, and infrastructure services, following a user-centric, service-oriented philosophy.
Her research explores the use of computational social science and agent-based modeling to understand leadership, educational learning, and pedagogy in complex adaptive systems. She earned her B.S. in Computer Engineering and MBA from Florida Atlantic University, MSLIS from Florida State University, and PhD from George Mason University. She has been recognized as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker and as one of eCampus News’s “11 Leaders Shaping the Future of Higher Education,” and has held national and international leadership roles in digital infrastructure and library technology initiatives, programs, and boards.
