Ann Shumelda Okerson

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Ann S. Okerson

Ann Shumelda Okerson (b. c. 1950) is an American librarian and expert on the place of new digital technologies in libraries.

Career[]

Okerson serves as Senior Advisor on Electronic Strategies for the Center for Research Libraries. She served as Associate University Librarian at Yale University, following 15 years of academic library and library management experience, experience in the commercial sector, and service as founding senior program officer for scholarly communications at the Association of Research Libraries. 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.

At Yale, in 1996, she organized and for fifteen years ran the Northeast Research Libraries consortium (NERL), a group of 30 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 recognized[by whom?] as one of the pre-eminent consortia in academic libraries worldwide. Okerson serves as one of the active, founding members 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.[1] Its extensive annotations and links are complemented by Liblicense-l, an international, moderated online discussion list frequented today by some 5,500 librarians, publishers, attorneys, students and numerous other interested individuals from all seven world continents. 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.

Publications[]

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.[2] The ALA named her Serials Librarian of the year in 1993.[3] In 1999, she was named the winner of ALA's LITA/High Tech award.[4]

In 1992, she wrote the synopsis chapter of the Andrew W. Mellon study University Libraries and Scholarly Communication.[5] 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 University Presses (formerly known as and described by Wikipedia as the Association of American University Presses), and edited three volumes of proceedings from those symposia. With James 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.[6]

References[]

  1. ^ "LIBLICENSE". liblicense.crl.edu. Retrieved July 9, 2017.
  2. ^ "Best Article". Retrieved March 6, 2021.
  3. ^ "Serials Librarian of the Year". Retrieved March 6, 2021.
  4. ^ "HiTech Award". Retrieved March 6, 2021.
  5. ^ Ann Shumelda Okerson. "Synopsis". Archived from the original on 2002-03-29.
  6. ^ Okerson, Ann Shumelda; O'Donnell, James J., eds. (1995). Scholarly journals at the crossroads : a subversive proposal for electronic publishing. Washington, D.C.: Office of Scientific & Academic Pub., Association of Research Libraries. ISBN 0-918006-26-0.

External links[]

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