Martin Halbert, Director for Digital Innovations at the Emory University Libraries, has been named Dean of Libraries at the University of North Texas Libraries. Halbert will also have a joint appointment as an associate professor in the UNT College of Information. UNT was recently named as one of the "Up-and-coming National Universities" by U.S. News & World Report in its "Best Colleges 2010" issue.

Halbert is widely known for his innovative work in the MetaScholar Initiative and, more recently, the MetaArchive Cooperative.

He has co-edited The Information Commons: A Field Guide, edited or co-edited several proceedings, and authored or coauthored a number of papers on digital library topics, including "Combined Searching of Web and OAI Digital Library Resources," "Digital Library Federation (DLF) Aquifer Project," "Findings from the Mellon Metadata Harvesting Initiative," "Integrating ETD Services into Campus Institutional Repository Infrastructures Using Fedora," "Lessons from the Information Commons Frontier," "An Initial Evaluation of Automated Organization for Digital Library Browsing," "The MetaArchive Cooperative: A Collaborative Approach to Distributed Digital Preservation," and "The Metascholar Initiative: AmericanSouth.Org and MetaArchive.Org."

He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University, where his dissertation was on "New Models for Research Libraries in the Digital Age" (excerpt). He also holds an M.L.I.S. from the University of Texas and a B.A. from Rice University.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Halbert replaces Dr. B. Donald Grose, who retired from the dean position in July after serving 21 years with the UNT Libraries. Dr. Judith Forney, dean of UNT's School of Merchandising and Hospitality Management, will continue as interim dean of the libraries until Halbert arrives at UNT.

In his position with Emory University Libraries, Halbert has served as the principal investigator for digital library services and research projects totaling $6.1 million, including the Transatlantic Slave Trade Voyages and Origins projects, which offer comprehensive access to primary data from four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. Halbert is also president of MetaArchive Cooperative, an international consortium of research libraries and institutes that preserve digital archives in partnership with the Library of Congress, as part of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.

"Dr. Halbert's strengths lie in digital library services, innovative ideas, strategic planning and management of multiple libraries on one university campus," said Dr. Wendy K. Wilkins, UNT provost and vice president for academic affairs. "We are delighted that he also has a national reputation among funding agencies and leading digital and technological library organizations, and we look forward to welcoming him to UNT."

Halbert, a native of Houston, said the UNT Libraries' national reputation as a leader in digital projects and services attracted him to the university.

"Libraries are changing with the times, and UNT is at the forefront of that. I am looking forward to being part of the growth of the UNT Libraries, and I'm delighted to be part of the UNT community," he said. "I'm also happy to be returning to Texas, where I grew up."

At Emory, Halbert is an adjunct professor in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, where he developed a doctoral certificate in digital scholarship and new media, an interdisciplinary credential that provides graduate students with expertise in new forms of research and publication using digital media.

He is also the principal investigator of the Librarians for the Digital Age Master of Library Science program for north Georgia, a partnership with UNT's College of Information and the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of four historically African-American colleges in the city.

In Librarians for the Digital Age, 60 students from north Georgia are earning master of library science degrees, with courses taught by UNT faculty members in four-day institutes and online. The students began the program in the fall of 2008 and are scheduled to graduate in September 2010.

"The students are excited about being part of a premiere program like the UNT College of Information," Halbert said. "The program is intended to provide a robust next generation of librarians from diverse backgrounds who will be well prepared for the evolving roles of information professionals in the digital age. It has exceeded all of our expectations and goals."

Before being named to his current position with Emory University Libraries in February 2007, Halbert was the libraries' director for digital programs and systems for 11 years. He was also head of networked systems for libraries and head of the Computing Resources Library at Rice University, taking a semester off from Rice in 1994 to work for the U.S. Information Agency in Tartu, Estonia as an American Library Association fellow, advising the national university library in automation planning.

Since 2001, Halbert has successfully applied for many grants for collaborative projects, receiving funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Historic Publications and Records Commission and National Science Foundation.

He has served the National Science Digital Library, the U.S. leading online library for education and research in science, technology and mathematics, as chair and vice chair of the policy committee, co-chair of the technology standing committee and a member of the planning committee. He was chair of both the Emerging Technologies Interest Group and the Digital Library Technologies Interest Group for the Library and Information Technology Association, a division of the American Library Association, and has served as a grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation and Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Library Journal reports that Ann Thornton, NYPL's Director for Reference and Research Services, has been named as the interim Director of the New York Public Library effective in November.

Congratulations to Ann, who has worked at NYPL since 1996. She began her career as a Systems Librarian at the University of Houston Libraries during the period I served as Assistant Director for Systems there.

Carolyn Walters has been named Interim Dean of the Indiana University Libraries. Previously, she served as Executive Associate Dean of the Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In her role as associate dean of the University Libraries, Walters was responsible for public services, technical services, collection development and scholarly communication initiatives, and University Archives. She has led the planning for the proposed Research Commons in the Herman B Wells Library and the proposed renovation of the Business/SPEA Information Commons.

In her 22 years with the IU Bloomington Libraries, Walters has also served as head of the Journalism Library, acting director of Collection Development, head of the Undergraduate Library, head of Information Commons/Undergraduate Library Services and director of public services. In 2002, she became the first librarian to receive the Michael Gordon Faculty Award presented by IU's Division of Student Affairs.

Walters was a fellow in the Academic Leadership Program of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (2006) and was selected to participate in the Frye Leadership Institute (2005), sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources, EDUCAUSE and Emory University. She was a member of the inaugural group of IU's LEaD Program, a year-long leadership development program. In her positions at IU, Walters has distinguished herself in areas including undergraduate services, space planning, and scholarly communications.

The dean of University Libraries provides administrative leadership for a system of libraries on IU eight campuses. On the Bloomington campus, the dean provides strategic planning and policy direction in the areas of collection development, public and technical services, facilities planning and personnel policies.

The National Coalition for History is reporting that David S. Ferriero, Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries at the New York Public Library, will be the next Archivist of the United States. The Washington Post is also running the story.

Peter Nürnberg has been named as the Chief Technology Officer of the Texas Digital Library.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Peter comes to the TDL with extensive experience in both academic research and industry environments. Since 2001 he has helmed his own software consulting company (Xtructure), managing teams on a wide variety of development efforts, including projects for NASA and TeleAtlas. He also previously served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Software and Media Technology at Aalborg University in Esbjerg, Denmark, pursuing research in areas such as hypermedia, Web technologies, knowledge and information management, and digital libraries.

Congratulations to Peter Suber, who has received a Berkman Center for Internet & Society joint fellowship at the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the Harvard Law School Library. He will "be focusing on Open Access documentation efforts, as well as outreach around Open Access, across Harvard and beyond."

In his advocacy efforts for the open access movement, Suber has been a tireless speaker and a prolific author, noted for his exceptionally lucid, insightful, and well-reasoned commentary.

Here's an excerpt from Stevan Harnad's "Peter Suber Appointed Berkman Fellow at Harvard" post:

A brilliant choice, and eminently well-deserved. Peter—whose historic contributions to the growth of OA have been spectacularly successful—will continue his invaluable OA work, but this Fellowship will also make it possible for him to begin writing the books on OA and related matters that are welling up in him, and that the world scholarly and scientific research community (as well as the historians of knowledge) are eagerly waiting to read, digest and learn from for years to come.

The Society for Scholarly Publishing has published a profile of Todd Carpenter, who is the Managing Director of the National Information Standards Organization.

Here's an excerpt:

[SSP] Where do you see scholarly communications heading, and what new directions interest you most?

[Carpenter] I see the following as critical areas that are in most desperate need of attention in our community: discovery, license and ownership questions, and preservation. On the questions of discovery, thanks to Google, we seem to have forgotten all of the advances in organization that libraries have developed over decades in finding information and have turned to rely solely on keyword searching. This works well enough 80% of the time. The problem is that people have become satisfied with the 80% results that Google returns in fractions of a second, not understanding that there may be something critical in that remaining 20%. Incorporating into search classification structures, ontologies, and improved semantics—all common under different guises in the print world—is a critical component to ensuring that ALL relevant content is visible to users. . . .

The directions that interest me most include ebooks and display technology, identification of items, people and content, and copyright. The next transformation of our industry will likely be in how people access digital content—moving away from the desktop to something that more resembles the experience of using a book. Much of this will depend on developments with display technology, digital ink, and battery power. How people interact with content is going to come down to better solutions for identification of people and content. Control of access to content will be driven by advances in identity management. This likely won't come out of the publishing world (more likely banking or government), but will have incredible ramifications on how scholarship and all content is distributed. Finally, sharing and reuse of content is not likely to be contained by the current rules for copyright. Restructuring those rules to acknowledge and allow what most people want to do with content will be a key question worth watching if copyright is to continue to have any respect by end-users of content.

In "A Conversation with Kristin Antelman," Brett Bonfield has interviews Kristin Antelman, Associate Director for the Digital Library at the North Carolina State University Libraries about the Taiga Forum (a group for Assistant/Associate University Librarians and Assistant/Associate Directors), its controversial 2009 Provocative Statements, and other topics.

Here's an excerpt:

[Bonfield] Is there anything we could do to that would keep us from being at the mercy of Google and the major publishers? . . . .

[Antelman] Scholarly publishers, operating in an increasingly consolidated market, will continue to raise prices beyond inflation and restrict libraries through complex big deal licenses. They do have us at their mercy. Open access may be the eventual solution (and I think it is) but, in the interim, the detrimental impacts of their dominance (smaller market for monographs, for instance) will continue to be significant. One thing libraries can do—and many have done—is never again enter into big deals, where flexibility is traded for cost savings. Another thing libraries can do is to be less fixated on collecting for posterity. Scholarly work is increasingly preserved beyond our walls: a significant percentage of the best articles are already openly available on the web (and this segment is growing), while another significant percentage is made openly available by publishers after an embargo period. Libraries, collectively, will have to be less dogmatic about licensing (and replicating) complete and official versions of the STM (scientific/technical/medical) literature. At risk are two dimensions of our mission that have historically (and justifiably) defined us as research libraries: developing collections of significant breadth to meet the needs of all our constituents and maintaining the capacity to invest in new services.

The finalists for the Dean of Libraries position at the University of Maryland Libraries are Larry Alford, Dean of University Libraries at Temple University, John Howard, Associate University Librarian at Arizona State University, and Patricia Steele, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries at Indiana University Bloomington.

Read more about it at "Dean of Libraries' Search Narrowed."

The Harvard University Library's Office for Information Systems has announced that Dale Flecker, Associate Director for Planning and Systems, will retire on June 30.

Here's an excerpt:

Flecker served the Library for nearly 31 years as an expert in information technology and libraries. He came to Harvard as a systems librarian in 1978, directed the Office for Systems Planning and Research from 1979 to 1985, and became an Associate Director of HUL in 1985.

Dale did more than anyone to guide the Library into the digital age. He understood the possibilities and the problems of e-journals, e-books, and e-catalogues as soon as they appeared on the horizon. At the turn of the century, there were no models for creating a library digital infrastructure that would store and preserve digital objects. Thanks to Dale, Harvard took the lead in this crucial area with its Digital Repository Service, and it pioneered in other aspects of online teaching and research through the Library Digital Initiative. Dale's advice determined library policy at many critical junctures. We will badly miss him.

Randy J. Olsen, University Librarian for the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, has won the first BioOne/SPARC Howard Goldstein Award to Advance Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Randy J. Olsen has held leadership positions in the Utah Library Association, the American Library Association, Research Libraries Group, Greater Western Libraries Association, Mountain Plains Library Association, and Utah Academic Library Council. He currently chairs the Library and Scholarly Communications Advisory Council at Brigham Young University and currently serves as a member of the Steering committee for SPARC. . . .

A pragmatist, Olsen initiated a series of concrete steps that have since provided sustainable models for a growing number of important campus publications. These solutions have likewise served as a direction for others to follow. It was Olsen's idea, for example, to hire Jeff Billiston as the Scholarly Communications Librarian to identify and provide publication services and programs. In 2006, Olsen encouraged Billiston to develop an institutional repository that now hosts the legacy issues for 12 publications, with several more to come. In 2007, Olsen became aware of several campus journals in danger of extinction as print-only publications. Careful review of each journal's situation resulted in a variety of solutions that range from a library-sponsored investment in the development of Open Journal Systems software for peer-review and content management, to customized varieties of Open Access publication.

It was Olsen's suggestion that four faculty members attend the Association of Research Library's Institute on Scholarly Communication in 2007. Knowledge about publishing options gained at this event enabled one of BioOne's newest journals, the Western North American Naturalist, to identify a solution to its critical need to modernize. Now in its second year in the BioOne.2 collection, WNAN has increased its distribution and begun to earn important revenue to help sustain its program.

Challenged once again by Olsen, WNAN's publisher the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum at BYU concluded that because their companion, Monographs of the Western North American Naturalist, is not their main revenue-producing publication, the best way to enhance its distribution was to add it to BioOne's Open Access collection. The two publications are now seamlessly available to users and their editorial staff is better able to manage both products. According to WNAM's grateful editor Mark Belk, Olsen has thus helped his publications meet their mission to communicate science broadly. Olsen's efforts to engage University leaders in this conversation have helped Belk strengthen his argument for the support necessary to ensure production for the good of the entire research community.

Abby Smith has been named the Director of the University of Virginia Library’s Scholarly Communication Institute

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Karin Wittenborg, University Librarian, and Diane Parr Walker, Deputy University Librarian at the University of Virginia Library and Co-Principal Investigators of the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI), announced today that Richard E. Lucier will step down as director of SCI, and that Abby Smith, currently senior advisor to SCI, will become Director, effective April 10, 2009. Bethany Nowviskie, currently SCI program associate, will become Associate Director.

Richard Lucier founded the Institute in 2003, together with Deanna Marcum, and under his leadership, SCI has worked to advance scholarly communication through annual summer Institutes and working with and advising Institute participants throughout the year. Lucier has actively advised SCI participants in the development of EthicShare, the Architecture Visual Resources Network (recently launched as SAHARA), and the Online Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. . . .

Abby Smith is a historian and consulting analyst with special interest in the creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in a variety of media; the impact of digital information technologies on cultural heritage institutions; and the evolving role of information as a public good. Formerly director of programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources, she has been with the Institute since its inception, and served as senior advisor since 2006: "I look forward to leading the Scholarly Communication Institute at this promising juncture in the evolution of the humanities, when scholars are embracing new technologies in imaginative ways to advance research and share it more broadly. Richard has set a clear course for SCI, focused on collaborative actions that serve scholarship broadly and change not just the work we do, but, just as importantly, the way that we work."

In addition to her role as associate director of SCI, Bethany Nowviskie is Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library. She holds a doctoral degree in English from the University of Virginia and has taught courses in literature, bibliography, and new media aesthetics and design. Nowviskie has been active in the digital humanities since 1995.