Allison Powell
University of Virginia — Scholars' Lab · United States
6 posts
Allison works at the intersection of humanities scholarship and sustainable infrastructure. She's responsible for the Scholars' Lab's long-term commitment to graduate training — the part of digital library work that almost no one budgets for.
Allison’s talk argues that the most underfunded component of the open-knowledge stack is human: the graduate curricula, the slow apprenticeships, the informal mentorship that quietly produces the next generation of builders. She offers a concrete blueprint for how institutions can reinvest without waiting for a federal program to save them.
Articles
What Digital Libraries Have Stopped Learning From Industry Recommender Systems
There was a period, roughly between 2008 and 2015, when the digital library community and the recommender systems community were genuinely talking to each othe…
Agentic AI in Digital Libraries — What Autonomy Promises and What It Actually Requires
Something shifted in AI deployment in 2025 that has not yet been fully absorbed by the digital library field. The shift is not in model capability — though mod…
The Library Catalog Was Never Neutral
The catalog has always made an argument. It argues that certain concepts are the correct way to organise knowledge. That certain vocabulary terms are the appro…
FAIR Was Never Built for Machine Learning
The FAIR Guiding Principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — emerged from a 2014 workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, were formalised by…
When Catalogs Hallucinate: Provenance and Trust in Retrieval-Augmented Library Search
A discovery layer that confidently surfaces a citation that does not exist is not a bug. It is the predictable consequence of stacking a generative layer on to…
Global Reach, Diverse Impact: Rereading the 2004 Manifesto
What the original JCDL theme understood about cross-regional collaboration — and what the digital edition inherits twenty-two years later.