April Hathcock, Director of Scholarly Communications and Information Policy at New York University Libraries, has been elected to the position of Chair of the SPARC Steering Committee. Hathcock has served as a member of the committee, which provides oversight and guidance to the SPARC organization, since her election by SPARC members in December 2021. Her term as chair will run from October 2022 to September 2025.
Hathcock brings extensive academic and legal experience to her new role. Before entering librarianship, Hathcock worked as an attorney at a global law firm with a specialty in intellectual property and antitrust law. She has a JD and LLM in international and comparative law from Duke University School of Law and an MLIS from the University of South Florida. At NYU, Hathcock has been active in educating the campus community on issues of ownership, access, and rights in the research life cycle. Her research interests include anti-racism and anti-oppression in librarianship and higher education, cultural creation and exchange, and the ways in which social and legal infrastructures benefit the works of certain groups over others.
Hathcock was named as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker in 2018 and is the author of the article ’White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS.’ She also authors the blog At the Intersection, which examines issues at the intersection of feminism, libraries, social justice, and the law.
The SPARC Steering Committee represents 240+ libraries in the US and Canada, and has affiliated organizations around the world, including SPARC Africa, SPARC Europe, and SPARC Japan. The full list of Steering Committee Members as well as information about SPARC’s governance and membership is available on sparcopen.org.
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