An Assistant Professor at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics, Alex H. Poole received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, where he studied with Helen R. Tibbo and Christopher A. (Cal) Lee. His research areas include digital curation, digital humanities, archives and records management, and diversity, equity, and inclusivity. He is PI of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded (2020-2021) project, “Exploring New Frontiers in 21st Century Archival Education” (Jane Zhang, co-PI).
Poole has received the following publication awards:
- The 2019 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research from the American Library Association for “’Be Damned Pushy at Times’: The Committee on the Status for Women and Feminism in the Archival Profession, 1972-1998.”
- The 2018 Dr. Bob Williams History Fund Best Paper Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology for “Harold T. Pinkett and the Lonely Crusade of African American Archivists in the Twentieth Century“
- The 2018 Arline Custer Memorial Article Award from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference for “Pinkett’s Charges: Recruiting, Retaining, and Mentoring Archivists of Color.”
- The 2017 Dr. Bob Williams History Fund Best Paper Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology for “’Could my dark hands break through the dark shadow?’” Gender, Jim Crow, and Librarianship during the Long Freedom Struggle, 1935-1955.”
- The 2013 Theodore Calvin Pease Award from the Society of American Archivists for “The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race, Space, and History in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South.”
Poole’s recent articles include:
- “‘Tearing the Shroud of Invisibility’: Communities of Protest Information Practices and the Fight for LGBTQ Rights in US Librarianship” (Library Quarterly, 2020)
- “An Ethical Quandary that Dare Not Speak its Name: Archival Privacy and Access to Queer Erotica” (Library & Information Science Research, 2020)
- “The Information Work of Community Archives: A Systematic Literature Review” (Journal of Documentation, 2020)
- “Digging into Data Management in Public-Funded, International Research in Digital Humanities” (Deborah A. Garwood, second author) (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2020)
- “’The Sage of Negro Bibliography’: Daniel A.P. Murray, the Librarian as Public Intellectual” (Library Quarterly, 2020)
- “Pedagogy and Public-Funded Research: An Exploratory Study of Skills in Digital Humanities Projects” (Deborah A. Garwood, first author) (Journal of Documentation, 2019)
- “Interdisciplinary Scholarly Collaboration in Data-Intensive, Publicly-Funded, International Digital Humanities Project Work” (Deborah A. Garwood, second author) (Library & Information Science Research, 2018)
- “’Natural Allies’: Librarians, Archivists, and Big Data in International Digital Humanities Project Work” (Deborah A. Garwood, second author) (Journal of Documentation, 2018)
- “Project Management as Information Management in Interdisciplinary Research: ‘Lots of different pieces working together‘” (Deborah A. Garwood, first author) (International Journal of Information Management, 2018)
- “The Conceptual Ecology of Digital Humanities” (Journal of Documentation, 2017)
- “‘A Greatly Unexplored Area’: Digital Curation and Innovation in the Digital Humanities” (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2017)
- “The Conceptual Landscape of Digital Curation” (Journal of Documentation, 2016)
Poole teaches courses in Information Science at Drexel. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Information & Culture, The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, and The Electronic Library.
From 2010 to 2013, Poole worked on the Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded DigCCurr II (PIs: Helen R. Tibbo and Christopher A. Lee).
