Edward J. Valauskas

Edward J. Valauskas (born October 3, 1950) is an American librarian, educator, and Internet publisher.

Valauskas is an instructor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University of Illinois. He teaches a variety of graduate classes including Internet Publishing, Internet Fundamentals and Design, Information Policy, History of the Book, Early Books and Manuscripts, Descriptive Bibliography, Reference Sources in the Sciences, and Virtual Worlds. Students in the Internet Publishing class have been converting the School's print journal, "World Libraries", into an openly accessible Internet-based journal at http://www.worlib.org.

Edward has taught at the School of Library and Information Management, Emporia State University; International Centre for Information Management Systems and Services, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland; Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; UC Berkeley Extension; University of Chicago Graham School of General Studies; and, Joseph Regenstein, Jr. School of the Chicago Botanic Garden.

In the summer of 1995 Valauskas wrote a proposal to the Danish publisher Munksgaard to start a new Internet–only, peer–review journal about the Internet. Munksgaard agreed to publish the journal in September 1995. On 6 May 1996, the first issue of First Monday (journal) appeared at http://www.firstmonday.dk. Since its debut, "First Monday" has published 932 papers in 147 issues; these papers were written by 1,161 different authors. First Monday podcasts can be found at http://www.firstmondaypodcast.org/. In December 1998, Munksgaard sold the journal to a group of the editors, Edward J. Valauskas, Esther Dyson and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. The server was moved from Copenhagen to Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University’s Library. Valauskas is the Chief Editor of "First Monday".

Since 1998, Valauskas has worked at the Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden. He is currently Curator of Rare Books at the Library of the Garden. He is the curator of the traveling exhibit, "Plants in Print: The Age of Botanical Discovery"; see http://www.plantsinprint.org. The exhibit opened on 1 April 2004 at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. and has since appeared at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Milton Hershey School Art Museum in Hershey, Pa., and Cherokee Garden Library at the Atlanta History Center.

Valauskas is also responsible for an openly accessible, book review magazine at the Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Entitled "Current Books on Gardening & Botany", the journal has been published online since 1999. See http://www.chicagobotanic.org/book. It specializes in reviews of new books in botany, horticulture, landscape gardening, and related fields.

Edward is the author or editor of several books related to the Internet and computing, including "The Internet for Teachers and School Media Specialists" (with Monica Ertel), New York: Neal-Schuman, 1996; "Internet Initiative: Libraries Providing Internet Services and How They Plan, Pay, and Manage" (with Nancy R. John), Chicago: ALA Editions, 1995; "Internet Troubleshooter: Help for the Logged-On and Lost" (with Nancy R. John), Chicago: ALA Editions, 1994; and, "Macintoshed Libraries" (with Bill Vaccaro), Cupertino, Calif.: Apple Library Users Group, 1987-94 (six editions). He has also written a large number of papers and articles for magazines and journals.

When he is not working on a computer, Valauskas collects books on paleontology, especially books written for young readers about dinosaurs. A portion of his collection formed an exhibit at the University of Virginia entitled "The Boy Who Never Grew Up: Dinosaur Books & Realia from the Collection of Edward J. Valauskas" in 1998. Edward is a member of the bibliophilic organizations, the Caxton Club (Chicago) and the Grolier Club (New York). He has a considerable interest in paleontology and is attempting to visit many of the Lagerstätten in the world. He has climbed to Cambrian Burgess Shale exposures in British Columbia, Canada; hunted fossils with his wife Nancy R. John in the Jurassic limestone exposed in quarries around Solnhofen and Eichstätt, Germany; and, as a youngster collected concretions with fossils of Late Carboniferous age at Pit 11 and the Mazon Creek area in Illinois (as well as in the Late Cretaceous Coon Creek Formation in McNairy County, Tennessee and around the Silurian reef exposed in the Thornton Quarry in Thornton, Illinois).