Rate My Professor Michael Nelson

Michael L. Nelson is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University, holding additional titles as Chief Scientist, Deputy Director, and Eminent Scholar in Academic Affairs. He also serves as Research Professor at the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center. Nelson earned his B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1991, his M.S. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University in 1997, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University in 2000, with a dissertation on Buckets: Smart Objects for Digital Libraries. His professional career began as a Computer Engineer at NASA Langley Research Center from 1991 to 2002. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science from 2000 to 2001. Joining Old Dominion University in 2002 as Assistant Professor in Computer Science, he advanced to Associate Professor in 2008 and Professor in 2015.

Nelson's research specializes in web science, digital preservation, and web archiving, and he co-leads the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group, comprising six faculty and over twenty graduate students. He developed the NASA Technical Report Server and co-edited foundational protocols such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) in 2002, Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) in 2008, Memento (RFC 7089) in 2013, ResourceSync (NISO Z39.99-2014), and cite-as (RFC 8574) in 2019. With more than 250 publications and an h-index of 42 on Google Scholar, key works include Using the Web Infrastructure to Preserve Web Pages (International Journal on Digital Libraries, 2007), Why Websites are Lost (and How They’re Sometimes Found) (Communications of the ACM, 2009), and numerous papers in ACM/IEEE JCDL proceedings. Awards include the NSF CAREER Award in 2007 for self-preserving digital objects, Old Dominion University College of Science Distinguished Research Awards in 2012 and 2018, the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Pioneer Award in 2008, and multiple best paper and poster awards at JCDL conferences. He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal on Digital Libraries and previously chaired the JCDL Steering Committee. Nelson has secured grants such as a $415,000 award from 2016 to 2019 for Towards A Web-Centric Approach For Capturing The Scholarly Record.