The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has announced that Lorraine Haricombe, Dean of the University of Kansas Library, has been elected to the position of Chair of the SPARC Steering Committee. Haricombe has served as member of the Committee, which provides strategic advice and guidance to the SPARC staff, since 2010.
Haricombe brings to the Chair position a rich and deep perspective informed by working with a variety of libraries and institutions in her career, spending five years as Dean of Libraries at Bowling Green University, as well as serving in various capacities at Northern Illinois University, and Penninsula Technikon in South Africa.
Haricombe has been an active participant in industry-level scholarly communication activities, especially those related to Open Access. She has spearheaded Open Access activities at KU, including playing a leadership role as the University became the first public university in the U.S. to adopt a campus-wide Open Access policy. Haricombe has also been an active supporter of national public access policies and has been a vocal advocate of the NIH Public Access Policy as well as the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). She also played an active role in forming The Coalition of Open Access Institutions (COAPI), a rapidly growing group of institutions dedicated to advancing the implementation of open access policies and practices on campus.
SPARC's voting membership, which includes representatives from over 200 academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada, also elected Mary Case, University of Illinois at Chicago (ARL director); Barbara Dewey, Pennsylvania State University (ARL director); Deborah Jakubs, Duke University (ARL director); and Mary Marlino, National Center for Atmospheric Research (non-ARL director) to serve on the SPARC Steering Committee for three-year terms beginning January 1.
Steering Committee members whose terms concluded in December include outgoing Chair (2010 through 2012) David Carlson (Texas A&M University), Maggie Farrell (University of Wyoming), and Rick Luce (Emory University).
The full SPARC Steering Committee represents ARL and non-ARL libraries in the US and Canada as well as SPARC Europe, SPARC Japan, CARL, and AASHL. The full list is available at http://www.arl.org/sparc/about.
