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Ann Shumelda Okerson | |
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| Born | 1950 |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | Pacific Union College University of California, Berkeley |
| Occupation | Librarian |
| Employer(s) | Center for Research Libraries Yale University Library |
Ann Shumelda Okerson (born c. 1950) is an American librarian and expert on the licensing of electronic resources and the place of digital technologies in academic and research libraries.
Okerson was born in Austria circa 1950 and moved to the United States when she was six years old. Her family lived in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles and then San Francisco in the late 1950s. She studied English and German literature at Pacific Union College and taught high school before studying for a doctorate English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She switched to UC Berkeley's library science program and earned her MLS. After graduation, she worked at Simon Fraser University in Canada, Blackwell's in the United Kingdom, and an antiquarian bookseller in the United States before becoming director of the Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing at the Association of Research Libraries in 1990. She joined Yale University Library six years later. [1]
Okerson has served as Senior Advisor on Electronic Strategies for the Center for Research Libraries since October 2011. She previously served as Associate University Librarian at Yale University for fifteen years. [2] Okerson has made major contributions to understanding of serials pricing, electronic journals, licensing of electronic resources, and consortial purchasing of electronic materials. She has been a leader in international projects to build a Middle Eastern digital library and has worked broadly with libraries in this and other regions.
Long involved with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), she has served in leadership roles in the Serials, Acquisitions, and News Media sections, and also three terms on IFLA's governing board, including Chair of the Professional Committee.
At Yale, in 1996, she organized and for fifteen years ran the Northeast Research Libraries consortium (NERL), a group of thirty large research libraries (and over 100 smaller affiliates) that negotiates licenses for electronic information and engages in other forms of cooperative activity. Now having reached the quarter-of-a-century mark, this consortium continues to grow and thrive under the umbrella of CRL and is one of the preeminent consortia in academic libraries worldwide. Okerson is a founding member of the International Coalition of Library Consortia.
Other activities include being a principal investigator on several cutting-edge grants, including two U.S. Department of Education Title VI grants for building components of a Middle East Virtual Library, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for digitization of Iraqi scholarly journals, and a foundation grant for improving liberal arts teaching through use of library special collections. Okerson has served on external advisory boards for a number of organizations, including both the Library of Alexandria and the Library of Congress. She has served as a trainer for INASP and in the past has contributed as an advisor and trainer for the eIFL project.
From 1997–2001, with funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), she and the Yale Library staff mounted an online educational resource about library licensing of electronic content in a project called LIBLICENSE. [3] Its extensive annotations and links are complemented by Liblicense-l, an international, moderated online discussion list to which some 5,500 librarians, publishers, attorneys, students and other interested individuals subscribe. In 1998, Okerson secured an additional grant that created the Liblicense software, which enables users to generate a customized license using standard language options. In April 2001, the Digital Library Federation endorsed the project's work on a Model Electronic License for academic research libraries. This model license has since been revised, adapted, and used by many libraries, consortia, and publishers. The entire LIBLICENSE project moved in 2012 to CRL, which continues actively to support it. The software was completely re-written in 2015.
Her articles on serials pricing (1987), on copyright (1992), and on publishing done in libraries (2016) won American Library Association awards for Best Article in the area of serials, acquisitions, and/or collections, in 1987, 1993, and 2016. [4] ALA named her Serials Librarian of the year in 1993. [5] In 1999, she was named the winner of ALA's LITA/High Tech award. [6]
In 1992, she wrote the synopsis chapter of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation study University Libraries and Scholarly Communication. [7] Also at ARL, she created and published five editions of the standard Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists (1991–1995). She organized and led four electronic networked publishing symposia (organized on behalf of the ARL and the Association of American University Presses) and edited three volumes of proceedings from those symposia. With James J. O'Donnell, then at the University of Pennsylvania, she edited Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Journal Publishing (ARL, June 1995), representing an extensive multi-national Internet discussion across many e-lists about the future of scholarly journals. [8]
A library is a collection of books, and possibly other materials and media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical or digital access materials, and may be a physical location or a virtual space, or both. A library's collection normally includes printed materials which can be borrowed, and a reference section of publications which are not permitted to leave the library and can only be viewed inside the premises. There may be other physical resources in many formats, such as commercial releases of films, television programmes, other video recordings, radio, music and audio recordings on DVD, Blu-ray, CD and cassette, besides access to information, music or other content held on bibliographic databases.
Interlibrary loan is a service that enables patrons of one library to borrow physical materials and receive electronic documents that are held by another library. The service expands library patrons' access to resources beyond their local library's holdings, serving as "an integral element of collection development" for libraries.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.
The term serials crisis describes the problem of rising subscription costs of serial publications, especially scholarly journals, outpacing academic institutions' library budgets and limiting their ability to meet researchers' needs. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than inflation for several decades, while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining subscriptions. The increased prices have also led to the increased popularity of shadow libraries.
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) works with libraries worldwide to enable access to digital information for people in developing and transition countries. They are an international not-for-profit organisation based in Vilnius with a global network of partners.
The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) is an informal, self-organized group of library consortia from around the world; it exists for strategic and practical discussion of issues of common interest among the consortia members. The ICOLC first met informally as the Consortium of Consortia (COC) in 1997. Over time, its name was adjusted to reflect its increasingly global character.
Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and conference papers.
The Center for Research Libraries is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries, based on a buy-in concept for membership of the consortia. The consortium acquires and preserves traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery. It also gathers and analyzes data pertaining to the preservation of physical and digital resources, and fosters the sharing of expertise, in order to assist member libraries in maintaining their collections.
James G. Neal is an American librarian, library administrator, and a prominent figure in American and international library associations. In 2022 President Joe Biden appointed him to the National Museum and Library Services Board which advises the agency on general policies with respect to the duties, powers, and authority of the Institute of Museum and Library Services relating to museum, library, and information services, as well as the annual selection of National Medals recipients.
A library consortium is any cooperative association of libraries that coordinates resources and/or activities on behalf of its members, whether they are school, public, academic, special libraries, and/or information centers. Consortia exist on a variety of levels, e.g., local, state, regional, national or international. Libraries commonly belong to multiple consortia. The goal of a library consortium is to amplify the capabilities and effectiveness of its member libraries through collective action, including, but not limited to, print or electronic resource sharing, reductions in costs through group purchases of resources, and professional development opportunities. The “bedrock principle upon which consortia operate is that libraries can accomplish more together than alone.”
Library publishing, also known as campus-based publishing, is the practice of an academic library providing publishing services.
Helena R. Asamoah-Hassan is a Ghanaian librarian who is the present Executive Director of African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA), the Board Chair for the Ghana Library Authority and the Secretary General of African Regional Memory of the World Committee
Laurel Anne Clyde was an Australian educator, teacher-librarian, author and academic who taught in colleges and universities in Australia and Canada, as well as in Iceland. She was known for her expertise in electronic resources and the Internet. Anne was also influential in the early adoption and evaluation of internet sites and online tools by teacher librarians.
The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (or SCOAP3) is an international collaboration in the high-energy physics community to convert traditional closed access physics journals to open access, freely available for everyone to read and reuse, shifting away the burden of the publishing cost from readers (traditional model) and authors (in the case of hybrid open access journals). Under the terms of the agreement, authors retain copyrights and the articles published under SCOAP3 will be in perpetuity under a CC BY license. The initiative was promoted by CERN in collaboration with international partners.
Morris Library is the main academic library on the campus of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, in Carbondale, Illinois. Named for Delyte W. Morris who served as President of Southern Illinois University from 1948 to 1970.The library holds more than 4 million volumes, 53,000 current periodicals and serials, and over 3.6 million microform units. Morris Library also provides access to the statewide automated library system and to an array of electronic sources. These figures make Morris Library among the top 50 largest research libraries in the United States. Library users have access to I-Share and to a comprehensive array of databases and other electronic data files. As the campus center for access to academic information and collaborative academic technology projects, Morris Library provides a wide range of services, including reference assistance, instructional and technical support, distance learning, geographic information systems (GIS), and multimedia courseware development. Morris Library is a member of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA). Delyte's, a new coffee shop named after former SIU President Delyte W. Morris operates near the entrance of the library. The library occupies 8 floor.
South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) is a non-profit consortium of member institutions aimed at negotiating the procurement of, and securing access to information resources on behalf of its members.
A collective collection, shared collection, or shared print program is a joint effort by multiple academic or research libraries to house, manage, and provide access to their collective physical collections. Most shared print programs focus on collections of monographs and/or serials. Similar efforts have addressed acquisition and/or retention of microform, federal government documents, and digital collections. Shared print programs often have activities in common with national repositories and archiving programs. Discussions surrounding shared print programs in their current form have come to the forefront as a popular solution to shrinking collection budgets, rising costs of resources, and competing space needs.
The Zimbabwe Library Association (ZimLA) is an association that represents library, records, archives and information professionals in Zimbabwe. Membership for those who wish to join the association is voluntary.
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