Ann Shumelda Okerson

Ann Shumelda Okerson (b. c. 1950) is an internationally distinguished librarian and expert on the place of new digital technologies in libraries. Since 1996, she has 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 a 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 is at present a leader in international projects to build a Middle Eastern digital library.

At Yale, in 1996, she organized the Northeast Research libraries consortium (NERL), a group of 26 large research libraries that negotiates licenses for electronic information and engages in other forms of cooperative activity. (http://www.library.yale.edu/NERLpublic) Ms. Okerson serves as one of the active, founding spirits of the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) (http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia) and an advisor to the Soros eIFL project.

Ms. Okerson has worked over the years on numerous projects and publications. In 1992, she wrote the widely-read synopsis chapter the Andrew W. Mellon study "University Libraries and Scholarly Communication" (11/92) (http://www.arl.org/scomm/mellon/synopsis.html); and also at ARL, she created and published five editions of the standard "Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists" (1991-1995). She also organized and led four electronic networked publishing symposia (organized on behalf of the ARL and the Association of American University Presses), and she edited three volumes of proceedings from those symposia. With James O'Donnell of 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. (http://www.library.yale.edu/~okerson/subversive.html)

Her articles on serials pricing (1987) and on copyright (1992) have won American Library Association awards for Best Article in the area of serials, acquisitions, and/or collections in both 1988 and 1993. The ALA named her Serials Librarian of the year in 1993. In 1999 she was named the winner of ALA's LITA/High Tech award.From 1997 – 2001, with funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources, she and the Yale Library staff mounted an online educational resource about library licensing of electronic content in a project called LIBLICENSE (http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense). Its extensive annotations and links are complemented by Liblicense-l, an international, moderated online discussion list frequented by over 3,000 librarians, publishers, attorneys, students and numerous other interested individuals. In 1998, she secured an additional grant and created Liblicense software that enables the 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 adapted and used by many libraries, consortia, and publishers.

Other recent activities include being a Principal Investigator on several cutting-edge grants, most recently two U.S. Department of Education Title VI grants for building components of a Middle East Virtual Library (http://www.library.yale.edu/OACIS and http://www.library.yale.edu/AMEEL), an NEH grant for digitization of Iraqi scholarly journals (http://www.library.yale.edu/international/documents/neh_pr_iraq.pdf), and a foundation grant for improving liberal arts teaching through use of library special collections (http://www.library.yale.edu/teagle). She has served on external advisory boards for a number of organizations, including both the Library of Alexandria (http://www.bibalex.org) and the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov).

External links

* [http://www.library.yale.edu/okerson Okerson's personal website at Yale]
*worldcat id|lccn-nr91-40795