About me
Dr. Oksana Zavalina is a Professor at the University of North Texas (UNT) Department of Information Science; a program coordinator for the MLIS general program of study, the Digital Content Management certificate, and the Information Organization concentration. In 2013-2018, she served as an Associate Director of the UNT Information Science Ph.D. program. Dr. Zavalina has also worked with doctoral students and candidates at the international level: co-organized Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2018 and 2019 Doctoral Consortium workshops and served on the iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee for iConference 2015.
Dr. Zavalina received her undergraduate LIS degree in Ukraine and worked for 10 years as a librarian at the National Parliamentary Library of Ukraine and for 2 years as the library director at the Kyiv School of Economics. Her LIS Master’s and Ph.D. degrees are from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). At UNT (and prior to joining UNT in 2010 -- at the UIUC), Dr. Zavalina has been developing and teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on library cataloging and classification, metadata for digital libraries and archives (in particular, language archives), and broader information and knowledge organization. At the invitation of the Texas Library Association, she led two workshops on the future of metadata. At the invitation of the American Library Association, Dr. Zavalina served as a research mentor for information professionals, developed and taught 9 offerings of a professional development course on metadata and Linked Data.
Dr. Zavalina authored/co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications. Her research interests include metadata management, and evaluation of descriptive and authority metadata (including quality and change of metadata) in brick-and-mortar and digital libraries and archives, with the focus on subject representation, collection-level description, Linked Data applications, etc. She also studies user needs for information organization in language archives and how these needs are met, including with projects funded by IMLS and NSF. Dr. Zavalina served on the editorial board of the Library Resources and Technical Services journal and was a guest editor of two special issues for The Electronic Library journal in 2021 and 2022. She and served on organizing committees of multiple LIS conferences, including ALISE annual meetings. Dr. Oksana Zavalina co-hosted the ACM/IEEE JCDL 2019 workshop "Organizing Data, Information, and Knowledge in Big Data Environments", served as a lead organizer for the ACM/IEEE JCDL 2020 workshop “Organizing Big Data, Information, and Knowledge”, organized and led the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ACM/IEEE International Workshops on Digital Language Archives in 2021, 2023, and the upcoming one in December 2025.
