Kathleen Burlingame

As Data & Society’s first research and reference librarian, Kathleen Burlingame serves as a general resource within the organization for finding and organizing research to maximize discoverability and impact. She also leads a special project to build a knowledge hub to make the broader body of sociotechnical research more discoverable.

Kathleen has worked in academic libraries and research institutions for over a decade, in both back-end technical work and front-end subject liaison and teaching collaborations. Before joining Data & Society, she led management of metadata, data wrangling, and discovery for the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ extensive collection of online resources.

In her work, Kathleen prioritizes user experience, transformative justice, sustainability, and ethical outcomes. She has led affinity groups and projects locally, nationally, and internationally to foster discussion, community, and research exploring critical issues in metadata such as bias, harmful language, privacy, and data sovereignty. She co-edited the book Ethics in Linked Data (2023) and co-founded the Data Rescue Project–an award-winning, grassroots collective that organizes rapid response archiving of open government data as a response to recent federal funding cuts.