Patricia Kosco Cossard
Cossard began her career in 1983 in the renewable solar energy sector in the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory Library where among other duties she cataloged the Lab’s technical papers and managed the papers of Project Matterhorn. In 1987, she moved to the main Princeton campus as the Science & Sci-Tech Catalog Librarian where she was a contributor to the National Name Authority Cooperative Program, a part of the Library of Congress’ Program for Cooperative Cataloging. She also served on the coordinating team converting the analog card catalog to machine-readable digital files. Concurrently, she collaborated with researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study to contribute to an early digital humanities program, Dicta Probatoria.
In 1989, she moved to St. Joseph’s University where she led the installation of its Geac integrated Online Public Library, (integrating the circulation, acquisition, cataloging, public catalog modules) where she coded the AACR2 classification filing rules so that call number searching , or shelf-listing, was enabled. When at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1997-2000) she managed the conversion of 4 out of 7 analog catalogs, into one digital catalog. From 1998-2004, she served as the Chair of the Computer Electronic Resources Committee for the Medieval Academy of North America, where she helped guide the Academy policies in ontologies, schema, and metadata standards for digital humanities projects and online publications, including leading a community of practice and developing national training workshops for Text Encoding Initiative.
In 2005, Cossard was a resident fellow at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities were she demonstrated an ISO 12200: Computer applications in terminology—Machine-readable terminological interchange format (MARTIF) in the The Multilingual Thesaurus for Medieval Studies (MLTMS). This was followed up with the digital publication of the Treasury of World’s Fair Art & Architecture, one of the Libraries most accessed digital publications. In 2016, she was the editor in chief of ERD: Built Environment Resource Directory for the Metropolitan DC Area, an Omeka-based catalog.
In 2007, Cossard began her affiliation with the Solar Decathlon Team Maryland, where she served as advisor for website development and management, 2007, 2011, 2017. In 2017, she began curating the data collection for Team Maryland in the Digital Repository for the University of Maryland (DRUM), a D-space based repository. In 2021, she began curating the Resilient Adaptive Climate Technology Living Lab & ThinkTank Collection as well.
Iconic Projects (Flickr Album)
