Biography
Nick Ruest is an Associate Librarian in the Digital Scholarship Infrastructure Department at York University. At York University, he oversees the library’s preservation initiatives, along with creating and implementing systems that support the capture, description, delivery, and preservation of digital objects having significant content of enduring value.
His research has centered on developing and supporting computational tools and methodologies for web archives, as well as creating data collection and analysis pipelines. From 2017 to 2023, he was co-Principal Investigator of the Archives Unleashed Project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (now continued as a service of the Internet Archive). He also served as co-Principal Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project “A Longitudinal Analysis of the Canadian World Wide Web as a Historical Resource, 1996-2014” (2015–2021) and the Compute Canada Research Platforms and Portals project Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge (2016–2020). Currently, he is co-Principal Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project “Developing Scholarly Digital Feminist Networks in Canada: Resources, Toolkits, and Outreach”.
He has previously been involved in the Islandora and Fedora communities, where he served as Project Director for the Islandora CLAW project. Additionally, he was a member of the Roadmap Committee and the Board of Directors of the Islandora Foundation, and contributed code to the project. He has also held several leadership roles, including Release Manager for both Islandora and Fedora, Moderator for the OCUL Digital Curation Community, President of the Ontario Library and Technology Association, and President of the McMaster University Academic Librarians’ Association.
Interests
- Web archives
- Data analytics
- Distributed systems
- Information retrieval
- Digital preservation
Education
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MLIS, 2007
Wayne State University
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Bachelor of Arts Political Science, Minor in History, 2004
University of Michigan-Dearborn
