Mat Kelly

Mat Kelly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at Drexel University's College of Computing & Informatics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His academic career spans multiple institutions and research domains, with a focus on digital preservation and web archiving technologies.

Dr. Kelly earned his BS in Computer Science from the University of Florida and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from Old Dominion University. His research spans digital preservation, web archives, metadata, semantics, and information visualization. He is particularly known for his work in developing open-source software packages for web archiving, including InterPlanetary Wayback (ipwb), WARCreate, Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL), and Mink.

His research focuses on creating more complete and accessible web histories through innovative approaches to web archiving, with recent emphasis on preserving personalized content like web advertisements. His work bridges computer science, library science, and digital humanities, addressing challenges in archive completeness, semantic change over time, and ethical considerations in web archiving.

Dr. Kelly's publications demonstrate a clear trajectory toward more sophisticated web archiving techniques, with increasing focus on dynamic content preservation, particularly web advertisements, and the ethical implications of web archiving. His recent work shows interdisciplinary collaboration across computer science, library science, and social sciences.

• Future Steward Innovation Award by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) in collaboration with the Library of Congress (2012)
• Multiple Best Paper and Best Poster awards at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
• Fellowships from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (2016) and NASA Virginia Space Grant Consortium (2014)

Dr. Kelly advises PhD students including Christopher Rauch and Hyung Wook Choi, and serves on committees for numerous other doctoral candidates. His research is supported by significant grants including two Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grants as Principal Investigator, totaling over $500,000, and an NSF grant as Co-PI. His current projects include developing web archiving tools for advertisements, metadata versioning, and privacy-focused archive systems.

Dr. Kelly leads the MAT Lab, where he and his students develop open-source web archiving software. The lab focuses on creating practical tools that address real-world challenges in digital preservation, with an emphasis on usability and integration with existing archival workflows.