Appointment of Dr. Brenda Reyes Ayala as an Assistant Professor

Dr. Brenda Reyes Ayala joins SLIS after completing her PhD in the Department of Information Science at the University of North Texas. She also holds a master's degree (M.S.) in Human-Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in the areas of Web Preservation, Multilingual Information Access, Information Retrieval, and Big Data. As part of her dissertation, she developed a theoretical model of information quality for web archives. At the University of North Texas she was a researcher for the Multilingual Information Access Project, a large, multi-year project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), with the goal of helping non-native speakers of English access digital library information through the use of Machine Translation (MT) technologies.

Before beginning her PhD, Brenda worked as a web archivist at the National Library of Spain. Her scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Library Management, and the Annual Review of Cultural Heritage Informatics. She is active in the Web Archiving community, the Joint Conference of Digital Libraries, and was a member of the organizing committee for this year's JCDL in Fort Worth, Texas. Brenda is looking forward to bringing her teaching and research experiences in Information Retrieval and Web Preservation to the University of Alberta!