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 Klein Center for Internet & Society, is an EFF board member, and is faculty in the Law School, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Kennedy School.
Halle comes to LIL from librarianship, with extensive experience in data and project management, curation, and instructional design. She has a passion for digital preservation, accessibility, and federal data rescue. Outside of work, she can be found petting dogs, experimenting with new crafts and hobbies, or reading a new graphic novel.
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.
Mike is a programmer who began his career supporting research initiatives at Harvard Medical School, developing tools and managing systems that enabled collaboration across campus. Since then, his work has encompassed embedded systems, network programming, and audio software development. At LIL, he uses emerging technologies to build tools that are transforming the landscape of legal research. Outside of work, Mike enjoys filmmaking and exploring different cuisines in NYC.
Harmony joins LIL with 20+ years of project and event management experience. While navigating emerging city and state laws, she helped pioneer the mobile cocktail industry while engaging local farms and sustainable practices. Harmony has worked closely with galleries, non-profits, and human rights organizations in cultivating events for great causes including LGBTQIA++ and civil rights, food and housing justice, youth safety, environmental and peace initiatives, reproductive freedom, deafness/communication disorder research and (not least) the arts. This passion for human rights has led her to LIL, where she enthusiastically supports efforts to advance and democratize open knowledge.
Jenny combines engineering expertise with legal practice to advance access to justice initiatives. She has worked on cutting-edge renewable energy projects for DARPA, DOE, and Sandia National Labs. In her legal practice, Jenny has provided representation in domestic violence, family law, and consumer credit cases, actively engaging with the Florida Access to Justice Commission. As co-founder of SavvySuit, she contributed to multiple mechanical patents, developed AI/ML products, and created a pro bono SaaS platform that connects volunteer attorneys with vulnerable clients.
Molly has worked on both sides of the library reference desk for over twenty years. While earning her PhD in book history, she cut her teeth in special collections at UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. After researching and working at national and local libraries, she managed the program that produces Chronicling America for the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has a passion for radical preservation of data, collections, and land. In the summer, she can be found in community gardens, working with free plants; in the winter, she can be found in front of a sewing machine, piecing together unconventional fabrics.
Shaban Mohammedsaani brings extensive experience in cybersecurity and system architecture to LIL’s infrastructure initiatives. Before joining the team, he founded Bitsy, a comprehensive URL management and link-in-bio platform that addressed gaps in existing shortening and bio services. His background spans telecommunications infrastructure at MTN Ghana, where he worked as an IMS engineer on services like VoLTE/VoBB/VoWi-Fi. At LIL, he aims to design and implement automated deployment pipelines, manage infrastructure, and ensure system reliability.
Kristi is a librarian and learning designer who is passionate about exploring how technology can transform our relationship with knowledge and spark learning. At LIL, she works on “librarianship of AI” research and engages with Perma.cc users to shape product development. When she’s not musing about digital futures or advocating for the humanities, Kristi can be found crafting her way through a growing list of creative projects.
Bella joins LIL as a traveling jester and amateur sleuth, juggling requests and investigating issues for Perma users. Before LIL, they worked in nonprofit arts and academia coordinating projects, people, and performances. Ever-curious with a love of learning, Bella is a student both in the classroom as an MLIS candidate at Simmons University, and in the world at large.
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.
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.
Jennifer E. Chapman is the foreign, comparative and international law librarian at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Law. Her scholarship has appeared in law reviews and journals, such as Journal of International and Comparative Law, Fordham Law Review, and the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, and in the library and information science texts Antiracist Library and Information Science: Racial Justice and Community and The Role of Citation in the Law. Prior to joining UVA Law, she was the research and faculty services librarian at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. Chapman has a J.D. and M.L.I.S. from the University of Maryland and a B.A. in art history from James Madison University. Prior to law school, she attended culinary school, worked as a pastry chef, served as collections and exhibitions manager and assistant curator at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, and performed with Equinox Dance Company (Maryland) for seven seasons.
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.
JJ Dearborn is a Strategic Advisor at Data Futures and a PhD student researcher at the University of Glasgow. She works at the intersection of biodiversity informatics, digital humanities, and global knowledge infrastructure, with a particular interest in how AI, semantic systems, and human-in-the-loop methods can help connect people with the richness of biodiversity knowledge hidden in literature, collections, and archives. Her work focuses on translating historic records into structured, reusable data that can support research and discovery at scale. Previously, she served as Secretariat and Data Manager for the Biodiversity Heritage Library at the Smithsonian Institution. For over 15 years, she has worked across international open knowledge and civic data initiatives spanning government, libraries, museums, and public data ecosystems. Her work is motivated by a long-standing commitment to safeguard public research investments and bolster accessible, interoperable, resilient knowledge ecosystems in service of Open Science and a more sustainable relationship with the living world.
Chris is a data scientist, demographer, and founder of the company Demographic Analytics Advisors. He began his career as a statistician and demographer at the United States Census Bureau as well as the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. He later served as the managing director for public sector data science for the tech startup Civis Analytics. His current work focuses on building tools to monitor the federal data ecosystem at dataindex.us, telling the story of federal data at essentialdata.us, and building tools to enhance decision-making in the public and nonprofit sectors.
We gratefully acknowledge support from, and collaboration with, these organizations.
