Lesley Langa, Ph.D.
Associate Research Scientist
Lesley Langa is a strategic research and program manager with over 15 years of experience managing national initiatives that address the needs of libraries, museums, and other heritage institutions. Her work focuses on access to information and cultural heritage collections, including who has access vs. who does not, how we curate and protect information for future study and use, how we support the cultural sector in its daily work to improve access and sustain our collective history. She is a policy-driven action researcher who aims to provide useful tools that can affect practice in the field and deliver practical solutions for cultural heritage professionals and helping to evaluate the mechanisms we use to do all of this. Her work has spanned several areas including digital collections, metadata management, evaluation and research, and user experience across the cultural heritage sector in museums, federal cultural agencies, and small nonprofits. She recently completed a PhD at the University of Maryland's iSchool.
Contact Lesley
More about Lesley's Work
Hanging Together
Lesley is a frequent contributor to the OCLC Research blog, Hanging Together
OCLC Publications
Redefining the Library Experience: Shaping Future Engagement with Communities
1 April 2025
Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Lesley A. Langa
Provides insight into how library leaders and staff expect changing library experiences to create more meaningful engagement and positive impacts in the next five to ten years.
Improving Open Access Discovery for Academic Library Users
25 September 2024
Ixchel M. Faniel, Brittany Brannon, Lesley A. Langa, Brooke Doyle, Titia van der Werf
Examines efforts made by academic library staff at seven institutions in the Netherlands to make scholarly, peer-reviewed open access publications more discoverable by users.
Redefining the library experience: Findings from the 2023 OCLC Global Council Survey
29 August 2023
Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Joanne Cantrell, Peggy Gallagher, Lesley A. Langa, Christina Rodriques
This report presents findings from a global survey of libraries that explored themes such as community engagement, collaboration, and innovative programs that meet library users’ continually evolving needs and expectations.