Ben Vershbow Email & Phone Number

Remote

I lead Wikimedia's Community Programs team, which develops infrastructure, tools, learning resources, and high-impact partnerships to support, expand, and diversify the global Wikimedia movement. Oversight of three teams/program areas: GLAM-WIKI (integration of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums with the Wikimedia ecosystem), The Wikipedia Library (digital library and reference services for Wikipedia editors and readers), and The Wikipedia Education Program (contribution to Wikimedia projects in the classroom).

New York, Ny

Digital strategy in the cultural sector. Engagements included: Metropolitan New York Library Council, Postlight/Obama Foundation.

New York, Ny

For more than five years, NYPL Labs was a generator of new ideas and tools for libraries and the digital humanities, with a focus on activating historical archives on the web and engaging the public in the organization and interpretation of knowledge. What began in 2011 as a small digital skunkworks unit evolved into a 29-person interdisciplinary department overseeing digitization, digital collections platforms, crowdsourcing initiatives, engagement with digital researchers and creators, and experiments in linked open data and digital cartography. In 2016, NYPL Labs led the re-architecting of the Library’s access policies around public domain content, removing paywalls and restrictions from hundreds of thousands of high-res digital assets in a major release campaign themed around sharing and reuse. Author and copyright reformer Cory Doctorow hailed NYPL's public domain release as “outstanding, world-leading work.” The NYPL Labs team also helped to incubate open source ebook technologies that are now the centerpiece of NYPL's digital initiatives.

New York, Ny

The first iteration of NYPL Labs was a small special projects unit developing experimental products in close collaboration with curators and library subject experts. Major projects of this period were What's on the Menu? and Building Inspector (among the first wave of library crowdsourcing apps), as well as the popular photographic remix tool Stereogranimator, and DirectMe NYC: 1940, which used digitized phone books to help search the 1940 U.S. Census. During this time, Labs was also commissioned to overhaul core special collections platforms, rebuilding the Library's archives portal (representing more than 10,000 collections) and launching a beta of a re-imagined Digital Collections website (which became the primary interface to NYPL's digitized materials in 2015).

New York, Ny

* Co-founded and built out NYPL staff blogging program: continues to be among the largest library blogging programs in the world* Co-authored NYPL’s social media policy; launched NYPL on Flickr Commons* Led development of two notable digital pilots: Candide 2.0 (commentable edition of Voltaire's seminal text) and Radioactive exhibition site (tie-in with book by Lauren Redniss w/ Parsons School of Design)

Brooklyn, Ny

Worked with electronic publishing pioneer Bob Stein at pioneering think-and-do tank exploring the evolution of reading, writing and publishing in the networked age. Connected to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and the NYU Division of Libraries. *Writing & Public Speculations *Editor and lead author of the Institute's acclaimed blog, if:book; frequent voice on digital publishing concerns in venues such as The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Chronicle of Higher Education, Buchreport, The Times (UK), Adweek*Product Development & Experimental Publishing* Producer and editor of series of "networked book" experiments exploring web-based frameworks for reading, writing, and annotation; authors/collaborators include McKenzie Wark, Lapham’s Quarterly, Siva Vaidyanathan, Mitchell Stephens, Noah Wardip-Fruin, Cathy Davidson & David Theo Goldberg*Scholarly Communication *Helped develop and launch MediaCommons, a community of scholars experimenting with web-based forms of media criticism and peer review, now maintained by NYU; substantially informed development of MLA Commons*Open Source Software *Product manager for CommentPress - WordPress theme and plugin enabling paragraph-level commentary in web documents, used by hundreds of publishers and educators; anticipated web annotation frameworks like Genius and hypothes.is