Rate My Professor Frank McCown

Frank McCown, Ph.D., serves as Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University in 2007, developing Warrick, a tool for reconstructing lost websites from web archives under advisor Michael L. Nelson. McCown previously obtained his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2002 and his B.S. in Computer Science from Harding University in 1996. His career at Harding University spans from 1997, beginning as an Instructor of Computer Science, progressing to Assistant Professor from 2007 to 2013, Associate Professor from 2013 onward, and currently Professor and Department Chair. Additionally, he has worked as a Senior Content Developer for zyBooks since 2019 and earlier served as a Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin Astronautics from 1996 to 1997.

McCown's research interests encompass web archives, web crawling, web science, web search engines, and mobile application development. He has authored or co-authored numerous zyBooks, 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 with Paul Winsberg), Mobile App Development with Android and Java (2018), and Web Programming (2016, key contributor with Roman Lysecky et al.). Key research publications include 'Tools for Discovering and Archiving the Mobile Web' (D-Lib Magazine, 2015, with Monica Yarbrough and Keith Enlow), 'Why Websites Are Lost (and How They’re Sometimes Found)' (Communications of the ACM, 2009, with Catherine C. Marshall and Michael L. Nelson), and multiple papers in ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries proceedings, such as 'What Happens When Facebook is Gone?' (2009) and 'Recovering a Website's Server Components from the Web Infrastructure' (2008). His contributions have advanced techniques in web preservation and reconstruction. McCown received Harding University's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011 and 2019, and Old Dominion University honors including Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant (2007), College of Sciences Dissertation Fellowship (2006), and Dominion Graduate Scholar (2004).