Steven Arakawa, Librarian for Training and Documentation, Yale University Library

Steven Arakawa is Chair of the Catalog Policy and Documentation Committee at Yale University and is working to lead the transition to RDA. He also serves on the Cataloging Coordinating Council, Macro Express Group, NACO Coordinating Committee and the SACO Coordinating Committee.

John Attig, Distinguished Librarian Monograph Cataloging Librarian, Pennsylvania State University

John Attig has been extensively involved over the past 30 years in the development and maintenance of cataloging-related standards, including AACR2 and the MARC 21 Formats. He currently serves as the ALA Representative to the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA.

Nicole Engard, Vice President of Education, ByWater Solutions

Nicole C. Engard’s primary role at ByWater Solutions is to educate librarians about open source software with a focus on the Koha ILS. In addition to her daily responsibilities, Nicole keeps the library community up to date on web technologies via her website “What I Learned Today…” (www.web2learning.net) and volunteers as a community moderator on opensource.com. In 2007, Nicole was named one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers and in 2009 she was the editor of “Library Mashups,” a book published by Information Today, Inc. In 2010 she authored “Practical Open Source Software for Libraries,” a book published by Chandos Inc. and in 2012 the second edition of “The Accidental Systems Librarian” which she worked on with Rachel Singer Gordon was released. Nicole was just voted one of the opensource.com 2013 People’s Choice Award winners.

Susan Gibbons, University Librarian, Yale University

Susan Gibbons has been appointed as University Librarian at Yale University for a five year term beginning July 1, 2011. She earned an MLS and M.A. in history from Indiana University, professional MBA from the University of Massachusetts and a doctorate in higher education administration from the University of Rochester.

Gibbons held library positions at Indiana University and University of Massachusetts, Amherst before moving to the University of Rochester in 2000, where she worked as the director of digital library initiatives before moving into administration. Gibbons was appointed in 2008 as the Vice Provost and the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester.

She is well known in the library world, most significantly for the library user studies at Rochester she has undertaken since 2004. In collaboration with an anthropologist, Gibbons determined how faculty and students do their academic work, find information, and make use of the physical and technological resources offered by the libraries. The results have led to service, collections and physical space changes in the River Campus Libraries designed to better meet user needs. Gibbons has given talks around the world on this work, which has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2007 she co-edited “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester”(ACRL Publications), and published her own book, “The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student: Making the Connections (ALA Editions).”

Nancy Y. McGovern, Head, Curation and Preservation Services, MIT Libraries

Nancy Y. McGovern is responsible for ensuring long-term access to the digital and physical assets of the Libraries and developing appropriate long-term strategies for an expanding range of digital content. Prior to February 2012 when she joined the staff at MIT, she was the Digital Preservation Officer (DPO) and a Research Assistant Professor at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a social science data archive at the University of Michigan that was established in 1962. She has more than twenty-five years of experience with the long-term management of digital content, including a decade at the Center for Electronic Records at the U.S. National Archives, more than two years at the Open Society Archives, and five years of experience at Cornell University Library. She completed her PhD on technology responsiveness for the digital preservation community at University College London in 2009 and her ongoing research interests include the organizational infrastructure for life cycle management and the means for organizations and communities to continually respond to the opportunities and challenges of evolving technology. She was designated a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in 2009 and a Digital Preservation Pioneer by NDIIPP in 2010.

Kari Smith, Digital Archivist, MIT Libraries

Kari Smith is responsible for acquiring born-digital records and manuscripts, establish workflows and practice for dealing with hybrid collections and assist with strategic planning. Prior to joining MIT Libraries in late 2011, she was the Head of the Visual Resource Collections and Media Services at the University of Michigan Department of the History of Art for five years. Kari led the VRC through its transition from a predominantly slide library and image archives to a collection of digital image resources. She engages with colleagues around the Libraries and Institute and at peer institutions as well as through professional associations. Kari’s research interests include intellectual and long-term access to cultural material especially through interoperable metadata of digital objects. She is a member of the Society of American Archivists, the NEA Roundtable on Digital Archives, and is a program committee member for both the SAA Research Forum and for the IS&T Archiving conference. She is an instructor with the Digital Preservation Management workshop series. Kari earned her B.A. in International Relations from George Mason University and her M.S. in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information. Her blog is Engineering the Future of the Past: http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/digital-archives/.

Erin Stalberg, Director of Discovery and Access, Mount Holyoke College

Erin Stalberg leads the Mout Holyoke Library, Information, and Technology Services’ staff in Access Services, Discovery Services, and Archives & Special Collections. From 2007-2011, she was Head of Metadata & Cataloging at North Carolina State University Libraries in Raleigh, NC. NCSU Libraries was a participant in the US National Libraries RDA Test. Stalberg has held previous positions as Head of Cataloging Services at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA) and as the Librarian for Semester at Sea (spring 2007 voyage), traveling around the world. Stalberg has also taught Organization of Materials II as an adjunct at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science and is currently Chair of the ALCTS Cataloging and Metadata Management Section.

Jessamyn West, Library Technologist & Community Manager, Metafilter.com

Jessamyn West is an author, community technology librarian and community manager of the massive group blog MetaFilter.com. She lives in a rural area of Central Vermont where she teaches basic computer skills. She assists tiny libraries with technology planning and implementation, helping them with wifi and websites and making sense of their systems. She maintains an online presence at jessamyn.com and librarian.net and has had her address and phone number on the Internet for a decade.

Other bullet-point type information that may or may not be helpful.

• Former ALA Councilor
• Hampshire College undergrad
• UW graduate [University of Washington], MLib. 1996
• Author of Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide (website)
• Co-editor Revolting Librarians Redux
• librarian.net was one of the first librarian weblogs
• Community manager at metafilter.com especially the question asking/answering part of the site Ask Metafilter.
• Official blogger at the Democratic National Convention 2004
• “the FBI has not been here” signs
• Wikipedia article

Alan Wexelblat, Interaction Designer & author, Copyfight

Alan Wexelblat is a career user experience professional with a special passion for intellectual property. He has written for Harvard’s Corante institute for the last eight years at Copyfight, a blog devoted to the intersection of law, culture, technology, and business around intellectual property. He is not a lawyer and promises that you don’t need to be one either to understand this stuff.