We are very excited to introduce new team member, Kathryn Stine, Senior Program & Engagement Officer, Data Science & Next-generation Metadata. Kathryn comes to OCLC from the California Digital Library where she worked as Senior Product Manager for Digitization & Digital Content, managing the team that supports and coordinates the University of California Libraries’ engagement with HathiTrust and mass digitization initiatives. During the pandemic, Kathryn led a systemwide group of UC Libraries liaisons who were making use of the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) and ultimately conducted an assessment of how the service was used by UC faculty and students. ETAS ensured that UC’s students, faculty and staff had access to millions of digitized print items stewarded by HathiTrust while library building and physical collection access was disrupted by the pandemic.
Kathryn also played a key analysis and management role with the Zephir metadata management system, a core infrastructure component of HathiTrust developed, implemented, and maintained by the California Digital Library. Zephir processes, stores, and exports contributor metadata to other HathiTrust systems and processes in support of digital content ingest, access, and discovery. In addition to this work as part of CDL’s Discovery and Delivery team, Kathryn also contributed to work in the Collections as well as Publishing, Archives, and Digitization program areas.
Kathryn holds a Master of Science in Information, Archives and Records Management as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. In addition to her substantial experience at the California Digital Library, Kathryn has held positions at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Chicago, through which she developed expertise in managing collections and the metadata that describe them in a range of contexts, including work with oral history media, visual resources, and archives and special collections.
Kathryn says, “Metadata work involves creative and impactful problems to address – metadata is political, dynamic, and essential for knowledge work.” We couldn’t agree more and are happy to have Kathryn on the OCLC Research Library Partnership team, where she will engage with our Metadata Managers Focus Group. She will also work closely with team members in OCLC Technical Research and within our product teams.
At the end of last November, we were happy / sad to say Sayōnara to long-time team member, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and now it is a real joy to welcome Kathryn, in whatever language works.
Merrilee Proffitt is Senior Manager for the OCLC RLP. She provides community development skills and expert support to institutions within the OCLC Research Library Partnership.