Vanessa Venti

Vanessa Venti is part of Harvard Library's UX & Discovery team where she is an analyst for Harvard Library’s digital collections infrastructure as well as the service manager and product owner for the CURIOSity Digital Collection Building Service, the library’s Spotlight instance.

In her analyst role, she works closely with our UX team, designers, and developers to implement new features, products, and processes. Her deep understanding of Harvard Library’s complex systems and how they connect enable her to analyze and test ways to improve the Library’s digital collections infrastructure. 

As the CURIOSity service manager, she runs the day-to-day operations and leads the support team in building and supporting the service. She works closely with curators to assist them through the collection building process from idea to launch and beyond. This work includes things like project consulting, data analysis and wrangling, legal review, training, and technical support. 

In both roles, Vanessa serves as a product owner. As the product owner of the CURIOSity platform, her extensive knowledge of the product, the Agile development process, and the curators and end users' needs are integral in managing the product backlog. Her broader understanding of Harvard Library’s digital collections infrastructure enables her to serve as the product owner for other major products Harvard Library is developing; currently as the Aviary pilot product owner.

Vanessa’s work reaches beyond Harvard. She is actively involved in the IIIF and Spotlight communities; learning from the work of other members and sharing Harvard’s experience. Additionally, she has helped contribute over 25 of Harvard collections (containing almost 100K items) to external aggregators such as DPLA, Digital Commonwealth, and Wikimedia.