INFO Panel Discussion: “From Quills to Quantum: Information and Access”

Please join the UMD College of Information for the first panel discussion of The First Amendment and 250 Years of the American Experiment: Access, Expression, and the Future of Information Series. Friends of the college, students, alumni, staff, and faculty are welcome.

Panel Description:

Demands for government openness were central to the Declaration of Independence, and the First Amendment guarantees rights to access and expression—yet the nation has continually struggled to define who gets access to what content. An energized book bans movement, a presidential administration adverse to preserving government records, long-running debates about what constitutes a record, particularly in digital contexts, equity of digital access, and potential algorithmic biases are among the current struggles with information access in our age of AI.

Speakers Jason R. Baron, Allison Jennings-Roche, Jonathan Lazar, and Liza Vertinsky, joined by moderator Paul Jaeger, will discuss these topics in this online-only Zoom webinar on Monday, November 9, from 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm.

Q&A will follow the discussion.

Panelists:

Jason R. Baron, Professor of the Practice, joined the UMD iSchool in August 2020 as a professor of the practice focusing on the intersection of law, archives, and information retrieval. He is a co-founder of the Center for Archival Futures, with research interests involving practical applications of AI, including providing public access to government records. Mr. Baron served as a trial attorney and senior counsel in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he litigated landmark lawsuits involving White House records, and was the first appointed Director of Litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration. Most recently, he served as Of Counsel in the e-discovery and information governance practice area at Faegre Drinker LLP. Mr. Baron is a recipient of the international Emmett Leahy Award in recognition of his achievements in the field of information and records management. He is also a recipient of the Justice Tom C. Clark Outstanding Government Lawyer Award from the Federal Bar Association. He received his B.A. magna cum laude with honors from Wesleyan University, and his J.D. from Boston University School of Law.

Allison Jennings-Roche is the Associate Director of Digital Initiatives & Collections for the University of Baltimore Libraries, Policy Fellow at the EveryLibrary Institute, Editor-in-Chief of The Political Librarian, and a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Information at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include information policy, advocacy, ethics, and human rights, critical information literacy, and inclusive leadership. She has a BA in Political Science and English Literature, an MA in Legal and Ethical Studies, an MLIS specializing in diversity and inclusion from UMD, and a graduate certificate in Organizational Leadership. She has a professional background in both public and academic libraries.

Jonathan Lazar, PhD, LLM is a professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland, where he is the executive director of the Maryland Initiative for Digital Accessibility (MIDA), and is a faculty member in the Human- Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). Dr. Lazar has over 25 years of experience in research and teaching in human-computer interaction, with a focus on technology accessibility for people with disabilities, user-centered design methods, assistive technologies, and law and public policy related to HCI. Dr. Lazar has authored or edited 19 books, including Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction (2nd edition, co-authored with Feng and Hochheiser), Human-Computer Interaction and US Law (co-authored with Fiesler, Wentz, and Kushalnagar), Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy (co-authored with Goldstein and Taylor), Foundations of Information Law (co-authored with Jaeger, Gorham, and Greene-Taylor), and Accessible Technology and the Developing World (co-edited with Stein). Dr. Lazar has published over 200 refereed articles in journals, conference proceedings, edited books, and magazines, and has received research funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), Google, and Adobe. At the University of Maryland, he frequently teaches courses on Human-Computer Interaction, Accessibility, User-Centered Design, and Legal Research Methods. He is the recipient of the 2020 ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility and the 2016 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award, is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy, and served as the general chair of the 2021 ACM ASSETS conference.

Liza Vertinsky is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law who writes at the intersection of law, economics and technology. She is also a 2026 Carnegie Fellow specializing in the study of local news ecosystems. Her areas of expertise include the regulation of emerging technologies, the law and economics of media ecosystems, AI and the law, contract law and theory, and law & economics. Vertinsky came to the legal academy after a decade of legal practice in the greater Boston entrepreneurial ecosystem. Through her combination of graduate training, legal experience, and time in the academy, she has been able to bridge the gap that sometimes exists between legal practice and theory to identify pragmatic ways for improving the state of the law in areas where private sector incentives seem to diverge most starkly from public needs. She obtained her undergraduate degree in philosophy and economics from Oxford University, her JD and PhD in Economics from Harvard University, and she clerked for Judge Stanley Marcus, first for the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida and then for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Panel Moderator:

Dr. Paul T. Jaeger, Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, College of Information, University of Maryland