a shift in career direction

In over eight years at the University of North Texas, I’ve gone from creating and running a one-man shop for library publishing to leading a team of librarians in public services who serve as subject specialists for various departments and who operate various library services, most of which are aim specifically towards grad students and faculty. I’ve got a great team and extremely supportive supervisor, but outreach services and library instruction have never been my area of interest or expertise. I’m happy to empower a team to carry out this work, but I don’t feel I’m the right person to offer vision in this area. I’ve been pondering a couple of different possible directions for my career—thank you to all who have given me a chance to interview over the years!—but without fully committing myself to a particular direction, I wasn’t able to convince anyone to offer me a job.

So I’m thrilled to announce that beginning in late July I will serve as the first program director for the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, a rapidly growing, massive digital collection of publicly disclosed documents from recent judgments, settlements, and ongoing lawsuits concerning the opioid crisis. (Perhaps you read about it recently in the Washington Post.) This role will take me away from scholarly communication and into digital libraries—something I felt closer to earlier in my career—and the “collections as data” movement.

I will continue serving as vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Open Access Book Usage Data Trust and collaborating with colleagues on moving towards a launch of that effort. Stay tuned for details!

UPDATE (2022-06-29): Glad to see more in-depth reporting based on the Opioid Industry Documents Archive—this time from the New York Times!