Research Aggregation, Discovery, & Notification: “Tyler Walters Appointed SHARE Director”
From SHARE (via ARL):
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, which stands for 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 maximize 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 organizations to participate in prototyping SHARE services.
[Our emphasis] 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.
“Through SHARE, the higher education community has a unique opportunity to improve the management and communication of digital research outputs and tackle the myriad new forms of output that are emerging,” said Walters. “Working nationally and internationally, SHARE has the potential to leverage and modify important components of our research ecosystem to better facilitate the awareness of research outputs and promote their reuse by members of the public, academic researchers, and other stakeholders. I’m excited by the prospects and look forward to working with SHARE’s partners, and to our future achievements.”
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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.
Walters holds a PhD in managerial leadership in the information professions from Simmons College, where he authored the dissertation, “The Future of Knowledge Creation and Production in University Research Programs and Their Effect on University Libraries.” He holds an MA in library and information science from University of Arizona, an MA in archival management from North Carolina State University, and a BA in history from Northern Illinois University. He was an ARL Research Library Leadership Fellow in 2009–2010.
Background
EDUCAUSE Article Provides Useful Overview of SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) (March 24, 2014)
Note: This article was co-authored by Walters and ARL’s Judy Ruttenberg.
See Also: ARL’s SHARE (SHared Access Research Ecosystem) Initiative Launches Knowledge Base (May 21, 2014)
See Also: SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) Project Plan Released (February 6, 2014)
Includes full text project plan document.
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Digital Preservation, Funding, Jobs, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Preservation, Publishing
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.