Ann Shumelda Okerson

Building library resources to support academic research and teaching into the next century is a task made more challenging by new technologies and the economic, social, and intellectual issues they raise. This page points to publications over the last decade that have attempted to contribute to discussion of those issues in various ways. In particular, it points as well to WWW resources that collect and present information of practical use to working librarians but of interest as well to others who care about the state of scholarly communication.

In March 2007, I visited Tokyo for conversations with partner universities and publishing firms: a brief illustrated report is available here

Recent projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation:

Books You Teach Every Semester (BYTES): final report from a study of overlap in academic readings assigned to students and kept on reserve in major libraries, with a view to determining possible priorities for digitization

Yale Electronic Archive (YEA): a pilot project for the archiving of networked scientific journals, done jointly between Yale University Library and Elsevier Science Publishing

For a discussion of current issues in science publishing from NPR's Science Friday, featuring Harold Varmus, Karen Hunter (Elsevier Science), and Ann Okerson, click here.

Current work on digital library projects to support access to materials from and about the Middle East is profiled in an article in the December 2006 issue of Egypt Today.