• ARL Board of Directors 2017–2018 Elected by ARL Membership

According to ARL News “Mary Ann Mavrinac, vice provost and the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly dean of the University of Rochester Libraries, began a one-year term as president of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) on Wednesday, October 4, 2017, during the Association’s Fall 2017 Meeting in Washington, DC. Mavrinac succeeds Mary Case, university librarian and dean of libraries at University of Illinois at Chicago, as ARL president. Case continues to serve as a member of both the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee as past president.

On October 3, the Association’s membership ratified the Board’s election of Susan Gibbons, university librarian and deputy provost for collections and scholarly communication at Yale University, as ARL vice president/president-elect.

Three new Board members were elected by the membership to serve three-year terms: John Culshaw, university librarian, University of Iowa; Vivian Lewis, university librarian, McMaster University; and Adriene Lim, Philip H. Knight dean of libraries, University of Oregon.

Continuing elected members of the Board are: Constantia Constantinou, dean of university libraries, Stony Brook University; Lorraine Haricombe, vice provost and director of libraries, University of Texas at Austin; Steven Smith, dean of libraries, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Ann Thornton, university librarian and vice provost, Columbia University; Diane Parr Walker, Edward H. Arnold university librarian, University of Notre Dame; and Leslie Weir, university librarian, University of Ottawa.

Also serving on the Board and Executive Committee are Austin Booth, vice provost for university libraries, University at Buffalo, in her role as chair of the ARL Coordinating Committee, and Elliott Shore, executive director, Association of Research Libraries…”

• Librarian of Congress Discusses the Just Launched Public Library Innovation Exchange With Staff From MIT Libraries & MIT Media Lab

infoDOCKET report that “staff from the MIT Libraries and the MIT Media Lab were honored to welcome Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, to the MIT campus on Thursday, October 5. Hayden learned about the work of the Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX), a project coordinated by a team from the Media Lab Learning Initiative and MIT Libraries.

The Media Lab Learning Initiative shared the following announcement about PLIX Thursday:

The Public Library Innovation Exchange is a Knight Foundation-funded grant project to build collaborations between Media Lab researchers and public libraries across the U.S. The project has three components:

• Residency exchanges, where we will match a public library with a Media Lab researcher to work on a project together. Each partner on the team will travel to the other partner’s institution for a brief residency, to allow in-depth work, co-design, and development.
• A public website, where we will host resources to help libraries implement projects created at the Media Lab. This will include how-to guides and kits targeted specifically to public library implementations.
• A series of online events and virtual hangouts for librarians and Media Lab researchers, to demo tools and provide a forum for conversation and idea generation. The goal here is to build a community of collaborators across the library and Media Lab worlds…”