Lynda Kellam

Lynda is the Director of Research Data and Digital Scholarship (RDDS), where she leads a team supporting research data management, data science, qualitative data analysis, GIS and mapping, digital humanities, AI and machine learning, institutional repository services (ScholarlyCommons), and digital projects.

Before assuming her current position, she served as Head of Research Data Services at Penn Libraries, where she led the development of campus-wide services for research data planning, management, and compliance with federal and funder mandates, with particular expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods research support and training in tools such as NVivo and ATLAS.ti. Prior to Penn, she was Senior Data Librarian at the Cornell Institute for Social & Economic Research (now the Cornell Center for the Social Sciences), where she directed the archive, managed data curation and preservation workflows, and consulted on data discovery, management, and reproducibility. She began her career in librarianship at UNC Greensboro, where over more than a decade she developed and led research data and government information initiatives as Research Data Services Coordinator and Associate Professor.

A co-editor of Databrarianship: The Academic Data Librarian in Theory and Practice and co-author of Numeric Data Services and Sources for the General Reference Librarian, Kellam has contributed book chapters and peer-reviewed articles on research data services, data literacy, and the integration of data into library instruction and scholarly communication.

She is a co-founder and steering committee member of the Data Rescue Project, a collaborative initiative to preserve vulnerable public datasets, which received the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Excellence Award in 2025 and the ProQuest/GODORT/ALA “Documents to the People” Award in 2026. She also serves on the Governance Board of the Data Curation Network, on steering or planning committees for projects focused on public data preservation and humanitarian archives, on the Assembly of Reviewers for CoreTrustSeal repository certification, and as the Secretary of IASSIST, an international organization for data professionals. Most recently, Library Journal named her a Mover & Shaker for community building, an annual feature that highlights emerging leaders and innovators in the library world.

Kellam holds a Ph.D. in American History and an MLIS from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.