Rate My Professor Frank McCown

Frank McCown, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, where he has served since 1997, initially as an Instructor of Computer Science, advancing to Assistant Professor from 2007 to 2013, Associate Professor from 2013, and current Chair. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University in 2007, with a dissertation on Lazy Preservation: Reconstructing Websites from the Web Infrastructure under supervisor Michael Nelson; M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2002; and B.S. in Computer Science from Harding University in 1996. Prior to his academic appointments, McCown worked as a Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado, from 1996 to 1997, and as a Software Engineer Intern at Auto-trol Technology.

McCown also serves as Senior Content Developer for zyBooks since 2019. His research specializations encompass web archiving, digital preservation, web crawling, web science, web search engines, and mobile application development; he developed Warrick, a tool for reconstructing lost websites during his doctoral studies. He has published dozens of research papers in these domains and authored or co-authored zyBooks textbooks including Mobile App Development with Android and Jetpack Compose (2024, with Dan Ouellette), Data Structures in Java (2024, with Evan Olds and Roman Lysecky), C# Fundamentals (2022), Mobile App Development with Android and Kotlin (2022), Database Systems with SQL (2020, senior contributor), Mobile App Development with Android and Java (2018), and Web Programming (2016). Notable papers include Why Web Sites Are Lost (and How They're Sometimes Found) in Communications of the ACM (2009), What Happens When Facebook is Gone? at ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (2009), Tools for Discovering and Archiving the Mobile Web in D-Lib Magazine (2015), and Agreeing to Disagree: Search Engines and Their Public Interfaces (2007). McCown received the Harding University Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011 and 2019, along with Old Dominion University honors: Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant (2007), College of Sciences Dissertation Fellowship (2006), Outstanding Graduate Assistant (2005), and Dominion Graduate Scholar (2004). His service includes program committees for ACM IEEE JCDL (2008-present), WADL (2013-2020), TWAW (2011-2019), workshop organization at Stanford (2012), and Program Co-Chair for International Workshop on Innovation in Digital Preservation (2009).