The ASIS&T published the winner list of 2024 ASIS&T Award of Merit on June 24th. Professor Marcia Lei Zeng, a schoolfellow, was the first Chinese origin scholar winner since the award was established in 1964.

Marcia Lei Zeng is currently a professor at the School of Information, Kent State University in the USA. She received her bachelor's degree in 1982 and master's degree in 1984 from our School.

Her research interests include knowledge organization systems (taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, etc), linked data, metadata and markup languages, smart data and big data, database quality control, semantic technologies, and digital humanities.

Her scholarly publications consist of more than 100 papers and six books, as well as over 200 national and international conference presentations, invited lectures, and keynote speeches. She was the P.I. and Co-P.I. of two National Science Foundation (NSF) National Science Digital Library (NSDL) projects and two Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded Linked Data projects. She was a 2015-2016 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Taiwan. She co-authored a guideline for producing Linked Open Data-enabled Bibliographic Data (LODE-BD) for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. She has been a member of the Multilingual Terminology Working Group for the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), an advisor and collaborator for the Getty Vocabularies Program's Linked Data project, and a member of the Getty Vocabularies Steering Committee.

She has chaired and served on standards committees and working groups for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the Special Libraries Association (SLA), the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), the US National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

She was the chair of the IFLA Working Group on the Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR) and IFLA Classification and Indexing Section. She served as the Executive Board member for the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), a member of the IFLA Working Group on Guidelines for Digital Libraries, an Invited Expert on the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, a member of the EU ISA Program’s Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) Working Group, a member of the ISO 25964 Thesauri and Interoperability with Other Vocabularies Working Group, Director-at-Large of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), Chair of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Advisory Board, and chair of the iSchools Digital Humanities Curriculum Committee (iDHCC) for the global iSchools consortium.

Currently she is serving as an Executive Board member of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), member of ISKO Scientific and Technical Advisory Council, and the liaison member of the ISO/TC 37/SC 3/WG 5 Management of terminology resources. She is the chair of the DCMI Education Committee and a member of the DCMI Governing Board.

ASIS&T was founded in 1937 and is one of the most influential international academic organizations in the field of information science and technology. As the highest honor of ASIS&T, ASIS&T Award of Merit is a lifetime award, which aims to recognize individuals who have made outstanding and continuous contributions in the field of information science. One person is selected every year and presented at the annual meeting of ASIS&T.