Sarah C. Williams

Sarah C. Williams serves as Professor and Head of Funk ACES Library within the University Library system at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, holding dual appointments as Agriculture Librarian and faculty member for the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. Her leadership spans library administration, agricultural information services, and scholarly communication initiatives.

Her research centers on Research Data Management and Agricultural Data curation, with deep specialization in Digital Preservation for long-term experiments like the Morrow Plots. Key interests include Library and Information Science applications in crop science, Data Curation methodologies, and Information Retrieval systems for agricultural research communities.

Williams' recent publications reveal a concentrated focus on transforming historical agricultural records into structured datasets, addressing critical challenges in analog data reuse, metadata standardization, and interdisciplinary data sharing between librarians and scientists. Her work bridges archival practices with modern agricultural research needs.

She actively collaborates through the Morrow Plots Data Curation Working Group and contributes to digital preservation conferences like iPRES, demonstrating sustained engagement with data infrastructure for agricultural science.