We are a team of librarians, technologists, lawyers, designers, and more, and we work out of the Harvard Law School Library.
We believe that libraries play a fundamental role in humanity as open, privacy-respecting, and sustainable information spaces. We also believe technology holds great power to break down barriers to information creation, preservation, and use.
Collection, curation, and preservation of knowledge and its provenance
Equal and private access to knowledge
Community service, building, and empowerment through knowledge
JZ directs the Law School Library, co-created the Berkman Center, is an EFF board member, and is faculty in the Law School, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Kennedy School.
Becky was a student of physics and religion before becoming a faculty assistant in the Harvard SEAS Artificial Intelligence group. She moved on to support Harvard’s open-access policies at the Office for Scholarly Communication, where she got the bug for web development. She now spends most of her time working on Perma.cc, advocating for web accessibility, and assisting with other LIL projects.
Jack worked as an appellate litigator before coming to write code at LIL. His proudest case was Finch v. Commonwealth, which returned health insurance coverage to tens of thousands of Massachusetts immigrants — and now lives on at case.law, the American caselaw database Jack helps to run.
Jack has served as a board member of the ACLU of Massachusetts and as a fellow of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He also teaches the Programming for Lawyers course at Harvard Law School.
Harmony joins LIL with 20+ years of project management and event experience. While navigating city and state law complexity, she helped pioneer the mobile cocktail catering industry utilizing urban and local farm ingredients with sustainable practices. She has worked closely with organizations to cultivate events for a good cause, focusing on LGBTQIA++ rights, food justice and homelessness, youth safety, environmental and peace initiatives, reproductive freedom, deafness/communication disorder research and the arts. This passion for human rights has led her to LIL, where she enthusiastically works on efforts to advance and democratize open knowledge.
Kristi has worked as an instructional designer and adjunct faculty at Simmons University. In previous roles at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Smithsonian Institute, and University of Richmond, Kristi focused on digital humanities projects that explore how we connect the past to the present in order to imagine a more equitable future. She is passionate about empowering marginalized communities to actively shape cultural memory for future generations in a way that represents all voices.
Jacob is a seasoned graphic designer with over a decade of experience in branding, illustration, and UI design. His portfolio includes collaborations with companies in travel, tech, architecture, and wellness. When not immersed in design, Jacob finds joy in family life and exploring the world on his bike.
Ari comes to LIL from the world of applied AI and scientific software engineering, where she tackled topics such as wildfire smoke detection, AI reproducibility, and building open-source contributor communities. She’s held many roles in the past, including software engineer, project manager, community organizer, library assistant, and research scientist, and is thrilled to combine all of these in her new role at LIL to create tools for just access to information. She is especially excited about the intersections of information, justice, and technology.
Chris is a programmer and writer whose professional history includes projects with NOAA’s emergency oil spill response team, the New Mexico state judiciary, and an effort to recover Arctic climate data from historic ships’ logs. Prior to joining LIL, he built tools and infrastructure to help government organizations share open data. Outside of work, Chris enjoys backpacking and exploring the Pacific Northwest in the company of his mutt.
Christian discovered the craft of research when his open source work with cryptography led to academic collaboration and an engineering role at MIT. Years prior he witnessed the impact of technology on law as a student at Berklee College of Music, when dotcom era file-sharing networks disrupted the music industry. At LIL, he aims to empower the engineering team, help invent breakthrough library tools, and improve access to justice.
Clare’s true occupation is as a milliner, creating multiple hats for herself everywhere she goes. She’s worked in every department of a photography gallery, as the event coordinator/alumni liaison/substitute teacher at a small independent school, as the database maintainer/research assistant/calendar keeper for a group of innovation and management researchers, as the compost watchdog/vinyl cutter whisperer/side-project logistics manager at LIL, the outreach and communications lead for Perma.cc, and now LIL’s Product and Research Director. She has an MLIS from Simmons University.
Ben has been a bookseller, an editorial assistant, and a cataloger, but the largest part of his work life has been as a reference librarian in a public library, where he was also a shop steward and treasurer of his local. Since then, he’s become a software developer, at first in support of Harvard’s open-access policies at the Office for Scholarly Communication; he now works on the infrastructure for all of LIL’s projects.
Ebru is a copywriter-turned-coder with a passion for flying plastic. She has been working in tech for over a decade, including stints in retail and e-commerce spaces as a coder, and in advertising agencies as a copywriter. Her work at LIL focuses on backend development and data engineering. Outside of work, Ebru enjoys playing ultimate frisbee.
Matteo is a software engineer specializing in digital preservation and open knowledge. Currently serving as Principal Engineer at the Institutional Data Initiative, Matteo previously worked as a Senior Software Engineer at LIL. During his time at the lab, he contributed to the design and implementation of web archiving technologies that now power Perma.cc, and spearheaded technical research into how artificial intelligence is changing our relationship to knowledge. Through his ongoing fellowship, Matteo continues to contribute to LIL’s web archiving and “Librarianship of AI” research efforts.
Jim is a data scientist and entrepreneur, and a dual fellow with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. After an early career in DARPA-sponsored high performance computing, Jim founded Renesys, the Internet Intelligence Authority, and later served as Chief Scientist at DynDNS. His current research focuses on the Internet History Initiative, a noncommercial effort to preserve and curate the historical datasets that document the Internet’s regional evolution, making their stories accessible to future historians and other audiences beyond the Internet’s traditional technical core community.
Katy is a computer scientist and creative writer. Her PhD focused on how creative writers make use of language models to support their writing; she is now a research fellow at LIL investigating how writers feel about the use of their writing to train large language models. She studies the ethical and responsible use of AI technologies, and thinking through how technology can support, rather than supplant, people as writers. In addition to “normal” writing, she’s dallied in computational and experimental poetry, and likes to play around with the web as a medium for creativity.
Max is a novelist, essayist, and editor who loves figuring out how to write about emerging fields, tools, and practices. Outside of his literary ventures, his work in theater, technology, music, video games, and dance have been acclaimed by The New York Times, Frieze, and The Financial Times. He is currently the publisher of The HTML Review and Wikipedian-In-Residence for the National Book Foundation. He is obsessed with libraries and archives.
We gratefully acknowledge support from, and collaboration with, these organizations.
