Colin Rhinesmith

2021-2022

Benton Senior Fellow

Colin Rhinesmith (he/him) is the Founder and Director of the Digital Equity Research Center at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. He is also a member of the Scholars Council at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and Co-Editor-In-Chief of The Journal of Community Informatics.

Previously, Rhinesmith was an Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Science and the Provost’s Faculty Fellow for Scholarship and Research at Simmons University. He has been a Google Policy Fellow and an Adjunct Research Fellow with New America’s Open Technology Institute in Washington, D.C. and a Faculty Associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Rhinesmith received his Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at 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.

He is the author of Digital Inclusion and Meaningful Broadband Adoption Initiatives (January 2016), co-author of Digital Inclusion Outcomes-Based Evaluation (May 2017), and co-author of Growing Health Digital Equity Ecosystems During COVID-19 and Beyond (November 2020), and collaborator on The Digital Equity Action Research (DEAR) Fellowship: A Participatory Action Research Project.