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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 in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Inspired by friends who were librarians, she switched to UC Berkeley's library science program and earned her MLS. [1]
She is married to James J. O'Donnell. [2]
After graduation, Okerson 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] She served as Associate University Librarian at Yale University for fifteen years. [3]
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. This consortium continues to operate under the umbrella of CRL. In her capacity as NERL leader, Okerson was a founding member of the International Coalition of Library Consortia, an informal group of library consortia from around the world.
Okerson has served as Senior Advisor on Electronic Strategies for the Center for Research Libraries since October 2011. [3] She 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.
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 to 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. [4] 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. [5] ALA named her Serials Librarian of the year in 1993. [6] In 1999, she was named the winner of ALA's LITA/High Tech award. [7]
In 1992, she wrote the synopsis chapter of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation study University Libraries and Scholarly Communication. [8] 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. [9]
Inter-library loan is a service that enables patrons of one library to borrow materials that are held by another library.
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 following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to library and information science:
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 "Subversive Proposal" was an Internet posting by Stevan Harnad on June 27, 1994 calling on all authors of "esoteric" research writings to archive their articles for free for everyone online. It initiated a series of online exchanges, many of which were collected and published as a book in 1995: Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. This led to the creation in 1997 of Cogprints, an open access archive for self-archived articles in the cognitive sciences and in 1998 to the creation of the American Scientist Open Access Forum. The Subversive Proposal also led to the development of the GNU EPrints software used for creating OAI-compliant open access institutional repositories, and inspired CiteSeer, a tool to locate and index the resulting eprints.
James Joseph O'Donnell is a classical scholar and University Librarian at Arizona State University. He formerly served as University Professor at Georgetown University (2012–2015) and as Provost of Georgetown University (2002–2012). O'Donnell was previously Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania (1996–2002). He is a former President of the American Philological Association and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. From 2012 to 2018, he chaired the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies.
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 the strategic and practical discussions of issues of common interest among its 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 the National Medal for Museum and Library Service.
A library consortium is any cooperative association of libraries that coordinates resources and/or activities on behalf of its members, whether they are academic, public, school or special libraries, and/or information centers. Library consortia have been created to service specific regions or geographic areas, e.g., local, state, regional, national or international. Many 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, reducing costs through group purchases of resources, and hosting 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.
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.
Trevor A. Dawes is a Jamaican-born American librarian and educator. He is the vice provost for libraries and museums and May Morris University Librarian at the University of Delaware. Dawes served as the 76th president of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
The Boston Library Consortium (BLC) is a library consortium based in the Boston area with 26 member institutions across New England.
A collective collection, shared collection, collaborative 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.
Sarah M. Pritchard is an American academic librarian known for her contributions to research library governance, women's studies and the future of digital libraries.
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