Tyler Walters, dean of university libraries at Virginia Tech, has been named SHARE's founding director, beginning on October 13, 2014. Walters has been involved integrally in SHARE since its inception, serving as co-chair of the SHARE steering group for the past year. The directorship is a two-year term appointment, during which Walters will continue to serve as dean of libraries at Virginia Tech.
SHARE (SHared Access Research Ecosystem) is a collaborative initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). The three associations established SHARE in 2013 to help ensure the preservation of, access to, and reuse of research outputs. Their primary goal is to help maximise the benefits of research to science and society.
As director, Walters will lead a small operations team in developing SHARE services to improve the infrastructure, workflows, and policies necessary to expand research impact. He also will serve on the SHARE Advisory Board's Executive Committee, which is chaired by the ARL executive director and includes representatives from AAU and APLU.
A top priority for Walters will be recruiting several partner institutions from the ARL, AAU, and APLU memberships as well as allied organisations to participate in prototyping SHARE services. Chief among the services are a notification service to inform stakeholders when research outputs are released, a registry of research outputs to document those objects being generated by publicly sponsored research programs, a discovery layer to identify and use those objects, and a content aggregation layer that facilitates the mining of large corpora of content, as well as other community-driven value-added services.
Since 2011 Walters has served as dean of university libraries at Virginia Tech, where he is embedding the libraries in the research enterprise through such activities as research data management and consulting, technology development, and digital scholarship production. He has served on many professional boards and steering groups for organizations such as the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), DuraSpace, and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Walters is a co-founder of the Educopia Institute, which established the MetaArchive Cooperative, a digital preservation federation of cultural institutions, and he is a co-founder of the Library Publishing Coalition, a consortium whose members are advancing library publishing services. He also serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Digital Curation.
