We’re beyond thrilled to introduce our first cohort of LIL Summer Fellows. The following seven brilliant minds will be working here in the Harvard Law School Library (HLSL) for the next 12 weeks, exploring new pathways in technology, law, and libraries.

group Fellows, staff, and interns in the Langdell reading room

Neel Agrawal, neelagrawal.comNeel comes from the Los Angeles County Law Library where he managed one of the world’s largest collections of foreign and international legal materials. He’s also a dedicated world percussionist. Neel will spend the summer making significant progress on his African drumming laws project, https://africandrumminglaws.org/. Email Neel at neel.k.agrawal@gmail.com

Jay Edwards, @meangrape Jay will spend his weeks in the Lab this summer analyzing web archives in Perma.cc and recently digitized cases in Free the Law. Jay was the ninth employee at Twitter and was the lead database engineer for Obama for America in 2012. Potentially more exciting 🙂 for the HLSL community is Jay’s eight year old daughter who will be popping in to share her Hebrew cataloging skills. Email Jay at jay@meangrape.com

Sara Frug, @ssfrug Sara is the Associate Director at the Legal Information Institute, housed at Cornell Law School. She runs the engineering team and helps design tools to make legal texts more accessible, usable and valuable. Her time this summer will be spent applying the techniques she uses with her team here in the Lab, and learning some new ones that she can take back to LII. Email Sara at sara@liicornell.org

Ilya Kreymer, @ikreymer Ilya currently leads the development of Webrecorder, a tool designed to allow any user to create high-fidelity web archives of any content simply by browsing the web through this tool. Ilya will spend his fellowship working to improve Webrecorder, and working together with the Perma.cc team to solve some of the more difficult problems facing web archiving today. Email Ilya at ilya.kreymer@rhizome.org

Muira McCammon, @muira_mccammon Muira will spend her fellowship building on her Guantánamo Bay Detainee Library research by writing a narrative nonfiction book about her journey probing the Guantánamo Bay Detainee Library, organizing a two-day, interdisciplinary international colloquium on GiTMO (marking the 15th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp) for Feb 2017, and interviewing a good number of GiTMO defense attorneys, journalists, veterans, and civilian book donors. Email Muira at muira.n.mccammon@gmail.com

Alexander Nwala, @acnwala Alex is a PhD student in the Computer Science department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. Alex will spend the summer studying and building solutions in the personal and event centered digital archives space, http://www.cs.odu.edu/~anwala/ Email Alex at anwala@cs.odu.edu

Tiff Tseng, @scientiffic Tiff will spend her time in the program working with makerspaces in libraries to help patrons skill share and connect over common interests using Spin, a documentation tool she created as part of her PhD work at the MIT Media Lab. Email Tiff at ttseng@mit.edu

The fellows have had a whirlwind first week sharing their research plans, running the first ever LIL fellows hour, and touring the HLSL.

jay-muira Muira and Jay

lunch Jack, Ilya, Paul

standing-table Sara, Alex, Anastasia, Neel