Laura Weakly is the Metadata Encoding Specialist in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. She works with numerous teams of digital humanities scholars to determine best practices for encoding innovative online scholarly projects and to ensure projects are in compliance with international metadata standards. Weakly supervises the Center's graduate research assistants and undergraduate student workers. In this capacity, she oversees students as they digitize, OCR and encode primary and secondary source materials and develop born-digital content.

Weakly is involved in many Center projects, including O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C. Law and Family Project, The William F. Cody Archive, Across the Spectrum: The Interdisciplinary Life and Letters of John G. Neihardt, and The Trans-Mississippi & International Exposition.

She has contributed to the National Digital Newspaper Project: Nebraska, which provided more than 274,000 pages of historic Nebraska newspapers to Chronicling America, and has worked extensively on The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online, conflating and encoding more than 5,000 pages of text (XML/TEI) from the celebrated Nebraska edition edited by Gary Moulton.

Weakly received a Bachelor of Journalism and Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Prior to joining the Center staff, Weakly worked as an editor and website developer. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with her husband and two daughters.