Posts | Clifford B. Anderson

Critical Legal AI Literacies: The Challenges of Synthetic Media

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School featured Clifford Anderson, Director of the Divinity Library at Yale University, in its Critical Legal AI Literacies speaker series. Anderson delivered a presentation on October 14, 2025, addressing the challenges arising from the proliferation of synthetic media. The series, supported by the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund, exposes the Yale Law community to alternative perspectives on AI and the law grounded in empirical evidence and critical considerations about the development, use, and impact of generative AI.

Yale Divinity Library Announces New Director

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Atla shared the news that Yale Divinity School’s library would have a new director starting May 1, 2024. At the time of the announcement, Clifford B. Anderson was Director of Digital Research at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, N.J., and Chief Digital Strategist at the Vanderbilt University Library, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Religious Studies in Vanderbilt’s College of Arts & Science.

The announcement highlighted his scholarship on academic librarianship, computational thinking, digital humanities, and theology, including XQuery for Humanists (with Joseph C. Wicentowski) and the edited volume Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies. Read the original announcement …

Vanderbilt Archive Founded to Hold Media Accountable Turns 50

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive, founded in 1968 as a three-month ‘experiment’ to explore possible bias in network newscasts, will mark its 50th year of continuous operation on August 5th.

Vanderbilt’s archive—open to everyone in the world—was the very first archive to record and preserve evening newscasts and special programs broadcast by ABC, CBS and NBC. The commercials that run during the newscasts are also preserved. In 1995, the archive began capturing a portion of daily news reports from CNN and added an hour of Fox News in 2004.

The archive was the brainchild of the late Paul Simpson, a Vanderbilt Law School alumnus who was upset over what he perceived as liberal bias in the big three networks’ reporting. He was dismayed to learn that the networks did not save their own tapes when he wanted to review a network interview with LSD-proponent Timothy Leary.

The Vanderbilt Library agreed to partner with Simpson to begin recording the evening newscasts on one-inch reel-to-reel tape. Simpson and then-director Frank Grisham began their taping with the opening of the 1968 Republican Convention.

‘Grisham was an entrepreneurial-type librarian for what was very much a do-it-yourself operation at the beginning,’ said Clifford B. Anderson, associate university librarian for research and learning. ‘Fast forward 50 years and the news programs are being preserved on specialized servers maintained by the university’s high-performance computer center.’ Read more …

ATLA and Vanderbilt University Divinity Library Contribute Funds for New Open Access Publication in Forthcoming De Gruyter Series

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing a long-standing cooperative relationship, ATLA and Vanderbilt University’s Divinity Library have contributed funding to support the open access publication of an edited volume in De Gruyter’s series on Introductions to Digital Humanities: Religion. The volumes in the series address “specific areas of study at the intersections of digital humanities & religion, offering an overview of current methodologies, techniques, tools, and projects as well as defining challenges and opportunities for further research.”

Clifford B. Anderson, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning at Vanderbilt University and Individual member of ATLA, is editing the forthcoming fifth volume, titled Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies. Several chapters are also being authored by librarians at ATLA member institutions. The book, expected to be published in 2019, explores topics such as digital humanities pedagogy in theological libraries and archives and the visualization of data from religious and theological collections.

Clifford explains that “digital humanities is becoming an important part of librarianship generally and this publication provides an opportunity for theological librarians to chart their own course in this rapidly-developing field. By publishing this volume in open access, I hope that it will gain wide readership among members of the ATLA and among practitioners of religious and theological librarianship from other regions of the world.” Read more …

Cultural Heritage in the Age of Big Data

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A public symposium titled “Cultural Heritage in the Age of Big Data” will be hosted by Vanderbilt University Libraries Friday, June 1, bringing together archivists, librarians, digital humanists and public historians to discuss the ethical implications of preserving and providing access to culturally sensitive materials online.

“Our annual ‘Cultural Heritage at Scale’ symposia critically examine the technological infrastructure for describing and providing access to digital cultural heritage in a networked age,” says Clifford Anderson, associate university librarian for research and learning. “Our symposium this year will grapple with how to preserve cultural objects for future generations while respecting the rights and following the norms of the communities that created them.” Read more …

Sustaining Television News for the Next Generation

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded funding to Vanderbilt University for a workshop and planning effort to examine and address the technical, legal and economic challenges of preserving broadcast television news in the 21st century.

The project, “Sustaining Television News Preservation for the Next Generation,” will bring together archivists, librarians and television news professionals for a two-day workshop at the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries March 8-9, 2018. Participants will develop new strategies for sustaining library-based broadcast preservation.

Clifford B. Anderson, associate university librarian for research and learning at Vanderbilt University, and Bernard Reilly, president of the Center for Research Libraries, are the principal investigators. The planning team also includes Sharon Farb of UCLA’s Broadcast NewsScape and representatives from the Library of Congress.” Read more …