2026 Keynote Speaker
Dr. Salwa Ismail
Associate University Librarian for Discovery and Access at Harvard Library and a member of Harvard Library's senior leadership team.
About the Keynote
Digital Libraries Now: Institutional Strategy, Stewardship, and Leadership Realities
In this timely and thought-provoking address, Dr. Ismail will explore how libraries and cultural heritage institutions are evolving beyond the digitization and publishing of collections to shaping the digital ecosystem through which knowledge is discovered, accessed, and trusted.
As emerging technologies become part of these environments, the keynote will address how institutions can thoughtfully strategize around balancing innovation with stewardship, sustainability, and access.
Grounded in the realities of digital libraries, including digitization backlogs, metadata fragility, platform dependencies, technical debt, and growing institutional expectations for seamless access, the talk will offer a practical lens for evolving user-centered digital libraries that advance and enhance our shared digital knowledge ecosystems.
About the Speaker
About Dr. Salwa Ismail
Dr. Salwa Ismail is the Associate University Librarian for Discovery and Access at Harvard Library, reporting to the Vice President for Harvard Library, and serves as a member of Harvard Library's senior leadership team. She provides strategic, collaborative leadership for services that enable people and systems to discover and access Harvard's vast collections, and she oversees units responsible for content acquisition, digitization, description, access, and user experience research.
Prior to Harvard, Dr. Ismail served as the Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology and Associate CIO at UC Berkeley Library, where she led a broad portfolio of digital and technology programs and services, including the university's Google Books Partnership and the UC North Regional high-density storage facility. Earlier in her career, she held leadership roles at Georgetown University Library and Florida Atlantic University Libraries, where she provided leadership for digital services, including digital scholarship, data services, computing, innovative technology spaces, interface design, and infrastructure services, following a user-centric, service-oriented philosophy.
Her research explores the use of computational social science and agent-based modeling to understand leadership, educational learning, and strategy in complex adaptive systems. She earned her B.S. in Computer Engineering and MBA from Florida Atlantic University, MSLIS from Florida State University, and PhD from George Mason University. She has been recognized as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker and as one of eCampus News's “11 Leaders Shaping the Future of Higher Education,” and has held several national and international leadership roles in digital infrastructure and library technology initiatives, programs, and boards.
Join Us
Join us for the opening keynote with Dr. Ismail, as we launch the Forum.
Register, mark your calendar, and be part of an inspiring and energizing start to the program. We look forward to learning and engaging with you.