Colin Rhinesmith (he/him) is the Founder and Director of the Digital Equity Research Center at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, where he and his team co-lead community-engaged research projects to better understand and co-design meaningful responses to local digital equity challenges and opportunities.
Rhinesmith is also a Research Fellow with the Quello Center for Media and Information Policy at Michigan State University, Adjunct Lecturer with the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Co-Editor-In-Chief of The Journal of Community Informatics.
Rhinesmith’s research examines the role of community informatics projects in creating and sustaining healthy digital equity ecosystems. He has defined digital equity ecosystems as interactions between individuals, populations, communities, and their larger sociotechnical environments that all play a role in shaping the work to advance more equitable access to technology and social, economic, and racial justice. He is currently writing a book on this topic to be published by the University of California Press in 2025 as part of their Technology Studies series.
Previously, Dr. Rhinesmith was an Associate Professor and Director of the Community Informatics Lab in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University. He has been a Google Policy Fellow and an Adjunct Research Fellow with New America’s Open Technology Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, and a Faculty Associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Dr. Rhinesmith received his Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was a U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services Information in Society Fellow, a Researcher with the Center for People and Infrastructures, and a Research Scholar with the Center for Digital Inclusion.
[Photo by Ruth Ganev. High-resolution bio photo]
