Marcia Lei Zeng is Professor of Library and Information Science at Kent State University. She holds a PhD from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and an MA from Wuhan University in China. Her major research interests include knowledge organization systems (taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology, etc.), metadata and markup languages, database quality control, multilingual and multiculture information processing, and digital libraries for cultural objects and learning objects.

Her scholarly publications include more than 60 papers and three books, as well as many national and international conference presentations. She was invited to give lectures and workshops in various countries. She was the Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-PI of two National Science Foundation (NSF) National Science Digital Library (NSDL) projects. She has chaired and served on standards committees and working groups for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Special Libraries Association (SLA), American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Her profile can be found at Journal of Internet Cataloging, 7, no. 2 (2006).

In November 2011, Dr. Zeng received a National Leadership Grant in the amount of $219,386 from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to help improve access to digital resources within and beyond the library world through what is known as "Linked Open Data"(LOD).