About me

Hello there! I'm Ben Carlson, the Associate Director for Scholarly Data and Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Biddle Law Library. I've worked at law libraries since 2008 in a wide variety of roles at five different schools, including Circulation/ILL at Drexel, Reference and Instruction at Northern Illinois, Emerging Technologies at Villanova, and IT Director at UConn. For the last 13 or so years, my main "things" have been institutional repositories, digital scholarship, and scholarly communication, which are the main focus points of my current job. I'm also heavily invested in the adoption, integration, and use of technology by law libraries.

I am also a teacher. I taught legal research for 10 years, primarily to first-year law students. Currently I teach Legal Informatics at the University of Washington iSchool in their Law Librarianship Program. That class is concerned with the interplay of technologies and legal information, studying the ways in which legal information is stored, organized, and accessed.

This site is my attempt to get my myriad thoughts, rants, and unfinished ideas out into the world. Thoughts expressed here do not reflect the views of my employer.