Jj Dearborn

Background

About Jj Dearborn

JJ Dearborn is the former Data Manager of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), where she led the transformation of over 63 million pages of biodiversity literature into open, machine-actionable data. Her work focused on modernizing BHL’s infrastructure to support global biodiversity research through automation, semantic enrichment, and adoption of open-source technologies. She is the lead author of Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet, a strategic white paper guiding BHL and the broader open science community toward more equitable, interconnected, and machine-readable biodiversity data systems. JJ has held leadership roles at the Smithsonian, Harvard, the State of Massachusetts, and the City of Boston, with a career spanning open data, digital libraries, civic technology, and biodiversity informatics. She has managed large-scale digitization and open knowledge initiatives for institutions such as the Peabody Essex Museum, and was a core contributor to open government programs including the Massachusetts Public Records Project and Open Data to Open Knowledge, funded by the Knight Foundation. A longtime advocate for the free culture and open science movements, JJ is also the co-founder of The Makers Guild, Inc, a sustainable design-build practice focused on historic preservation and environmental stewardship. She holds an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College, a B.A. in History from UCLA, and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).