Dewey named to Center for Research Libraries board of directors

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Barbara I. Dewey, Penn State’s dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications, has been appointed to a three-year term on the board of directors of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), an international consortium of university, college and independent research libraries.Including Penn State’s University Libraries, CRL counts among its active membership 219 libraries in the U.S., Canada, India, Germany and Hong Kong. CRL members leverage their collective resources, knowledge and expertise “to identify, acquire, and provide access to critical evidence and documentation for advanced research and teaching.”“I’m pleased to be representing Penn State as a member of this influential global libraries organization, and hope to advance the cause of the University’s research interests during my tenure on the CRL board,” Dewey said.Historically, the center accepted deposits of monographs, journals and other materials that were transferred to it by member universities. Now it subscribes to U.S. and foreign newspaper titles not acquired by its members, and collects materials that tend to be costly, such as microform collections; materials that require critical language skills to catalog, such as Middle Eastern and South Asian materials; and those that are difficult to obtain, such as dissertations from non-U.S. universities and political ephemera from developing regions.At CRL’s Council of Voting Members held in April at its Chicago headquarters, primary topics of discussion included digitization of collections, access to major databases, collection analysis and, in particular, its digital strategy. Members voted to remove access restrictions on CRL digital resources in favor of open access.