Roger Brisson, Head, Cataloging & Metadata, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University

Roger Brisson is Head of Metadata Services at Boston University. A research librarian at the University of Michigan, Penn State, and Harvard over twenty years, Roger’s career has focused on scholarly communication, digital libraries, and Western European studies. He attained tenure as Associate Librarian at Penn State in 1997. While a librarian at Penn State, Roger participated in several national and international working groups involved in the development of digital standards, and in 1998 was made Penn State’s first Digital Access Librarian responsible for developing and implementing a strategic plan for providing effective access to digital data. In 1996 he co-founded the first journal devoted to metadata, the Journal of Internet Cataloging (now the Journal of Library Metadata), and for several years served as its co-editor. In recognizing the need for more effective sharing of bibliographic data between research libraries on an international scale, in 1998 he, along with Monika Münnich of the Universität Heidelberg, led a team in the monumental effort of translating AACR2 into German, published by Saur Verlag in 2002. During this time, he was also asked by the Association of Research Libraries and the Library of Congress to become the first Coordinator of the German Resources Project, an effort to actively foster closer collaboration among German and American research libraries. In 2001, he was recruited by Harvard to head the newly formed Germanic Division, one of four large language/geographic units created to consolidate the acquisitions and processing of library materials in the Harvard College Library. Having completed his coursework for his PhD in the 1990s, Roger continued active research on his dissertation, and the opportunity following his tenure at Harvard permitted him to work toward finishing the dissertation and to complete the requirements for the Ph.D. Before returning to academic librarianship at BU, he recently spent two years writing his dissertation on the origins of anthropology in late 18th century Germany. In so doing he experienced first-hand the sweeping transformation of scholarly research through digital technologies.

Janice Christopher, Systems Librarian, University of Connecticut Libraries

Janice Christopher is the Systems Librarian at the University of Connecticut Libraries. She is responsible for UConn’s Voyager ILS, which has lived in the cloud since 2007, and she also does occasional cataloging. Before coming to UConn eight years ago, she was a systems librarian at the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries in Denver, Colorado; prior to that, she was the monograph catalog librarian at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Her MLIS is from the University of Texas at Austin. She also has a MA in English from the University at Buffalo and a BA in English from the University of Wyoming.

Greg Colati, Director, University Archives & Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut

Greg Colati is the Director of University Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center of the University of Connecticut where he is responsible for archives, special collections and digital repository services. Greg has almost 20 years experience in creating and managing digital content and collections in academic libraries and cultural heritage institutions and has directed archives and digital programs at a number of institutions of higher education, including Tufts University, The George Washington University, Bowdoin College, and the University of Denver. He has received a number of major grants for digital initiatives, and has published and presented extensively on the topic of digital collection building, digital repositories, and archival discovery and access systems. He has presented SAA workshops and webinars on building digital collections, essentials of digital repositories, metadata, and introductions to digital archives. Greg holds a Bachelors Degree from Colby College and Master’s Degrees in History (Trinity College) and Library Science (Simmons College).

Mercè Crosas, Director, Product Development, Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), Harvard University

Mercè Crosas is the Director of Product Development at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. Mercè first joined IQSS in 2004 (then referred to as the Harvard-MIT Data Center) as manager of the Dataverse Network project. The product development team at IQSS now includes the Dataverse Network project, the Murray Research Archive, and the statistical and web development projects (OpenScholar and Zelig). Before joining IQSS, she worked for approximately six years in the educational software and biotech industry, initially as a software developer, and later as manager and director of IT and software development. Prior to that, she was at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where she completed her doctoral thesis as a student fellow with the Atomic and Molecular Physics Institute, and afterwards she was a post-doctoral fellow, a researcher and a software engineer with the Radioastronomy division. Mercè Crosas holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Rice University and graduated with a B.S. in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.

Mary Danko, Director, Hartland Public Library & President of the Board, Green Mountain Library Consortium

Mary Danko is the Director at the Hartland Public Library, a small, rural library Hartland, Vermont. She is also President of the Board for the Green Mountain Library Consortium , a consortium made up of over 150 Vermont libraries that is currently providing member services of Overdrive, VOKAL: an Open Source ILS project and Mango: Online Language Learning.

Bob Gerrity, Associate University Librarian, Systems & Information Technology, Boston College Libraries

Bob Gerrity is the Associate University Librarian for Library Systems and Information at Boston College. Prior to joining BC in 1999, he was Coordinator of the Metro Boston Library Network at the Boston Public Library. Bob hold a B.A. in Journalism from Boston University and an M.L.S. from SUNY/Albany.

Todd Gilman, Librarian, Literature in English, Comparative Literature, & Linguistics, Yale University Library

Todd Gilman is the Librarian for Literature in English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics at the Yale University Library. He has worked at Yale since 2001. From 1994 to 1999 he served as a lecturer in English at various colleges and universities including MIT, Boston University, and The University of Toronto. In addition to his current work at Yale Todd serves as an online Lecturer for the graduate schools of Library and Information Science at The University of Arizona and San Jose State University. He has published articles and book chapters on librarianship as well as on Restoration and 18th-Century theater, opera, and music. He is also a frequent contributor of journalistic pieces on academic library issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Alicia Morris, Head, Technical Services, Tisch Library, Tufts University

Alicia Morris it the Head of Technical Services at Tisch Library, Tufts University where she is responsible for Acquisitions, E-Resources Management, and Cataloging and Metadata Services. Before coming to Tufts she was an Information Systems Analyst at the MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA. Alicia has her BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and MIS from Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.

Martha Rice Sanders, Knowledge Management Librarian, HELIN Consortium

Martha Rice Sanders has held the position of Knowledge Management Librarian for the HELIN Library Consortium in Rhode Island since it was created in 2005. She supports the work of HELIN primarily in the areas of cataloging and authority control, electronic resource management, and as liaison between the libraries and bepress for those libraries using Digital Commons as their institutional repository. On arriving in the HELIN Central Office, she helped write and manage a successful grant from the Davis Educational Foundation to establish institutional repositories for the HELIN member libraries. She manages the Innovative Interfaces ERM module for the Consortium and works extensively with Backstage Library Works on maintaining authority control in the HELIN catalog. Martha held the position of Catalog Librarian and then Coordinator of Technical Services at Providence College from 1993-2005. Previously, she held cataloging positions at the University of Connecticut and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she received her Master of Science in Library Science in 1981. She was honored to receive the 2009 NETSL award for excellence in technical services.

John Unsworth, Vice Provost, Library and Technology Services & Chief Information Officer, Brandeis University

In February of 2012, John Unsworth was named Vice-Provost for Library and Technology Services and Chief Information Officer at Brandeis University, with an appointment on the English Department faculty. He moved to this post from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 2003 to 2012. In addition to being a Professor in GSLIS, at Illinois he also held appointments in the department of English and on the Library faculty; also,from 2008 to 2011, he served as Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, a campus-wide organization that serves to coordinate and encourage informatics-related education and research. During the ten years before coming to Illinois, from 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the University of Virginia. For his work at IATH, he received the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center. He chaired the national commission that produced Our Cultural Commonwealth, the 2006 report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science, on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies, and he has supervised research projects across the disciplines in the humanities. He has also published widely on the topic of electronic scholarship, as well as co-directing one of nine national partnerships in the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, and securing grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, IBM, Sun, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and others. His first faculty appointment was in English, at North Carolina State University, from 1989 to 1993. He attended Princeton University and Amherst College as an undergraduate, graduating from Amherst in 1981. He received a Master’s degree in English from Boston University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1988. In 1990, at NCSU, he co-founded the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture (now published by Johns Hopkins University Press, as part of Project Muse). He also organized, incorporated, and chaired the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, co-chaired the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, and served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and later as chair of the steering committee for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, as well as serving on many other editorial and advisory boards. He was born in 1958, in Northampton, Massachusetts; in 1978, he married Margaret English, with whom he has three children: Bill, Thomas, and Eleanor.

Patrick Yott, Director, Library Technology Services, Northeastern University

Patrick Yott is currently the Director, Library Technology Services at Northeastern University where he leads a team charged with implementing a range of open-source technologies in support of core library operations, including a scalable and easy to use digital repository infrastructure based upon the Fedora architecture. Prior to joining the Northeastern staff in April 2010, he led the library’s Center for Digital Scholarship and served as the Library’s Director of Digital Technologies. Patrick has been working in the digital library arena since 1993 when he developed one of the first web servers at the University of New Hampshire and used it to serve 1990 Census data and other government information. Following that, he moved on to the University of Virginia in 1995 where he developed and directed the Geospatial and Statistical Data Center and oversaw the development of the Library of Tomorrow project.

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