Please join me in giving a warm welcome to our newest team member, Richard Urban! Richard joins OCLC from the Corning Museum of Glass, Rakow Research Library where he served as Manager, Library Digital Initiatives and Digital Asset Manager.
At OCLC, he will be working as a Senior Program and Engagement Officer for the OCLC Research Library Partnership, helping to care for our Metadata Managers Focus Group, as well as engaging with communities of practice to better understand the evolving ecology of data science and metadata. Richard’s broad background in both research and practice will be a tremendous benefit to our team, and to the institutions we serve through our work.
Richard comes with rich experience working across libraries, archives, and museums. Early digitization efforts at the Delaware Historical Society and Historical Society of Pennsylvania brought him to the Collaborative Digitization Program (aka the Colorado Digitization Project) where he worked with colleagues to develop and maintain CDP’s best practices for Digitization and Dublin Core metadata. As a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Florida State University iSchools, he pursued research on the conceptual foundations of cultural heritage metadata practices with an eye toward developing better user experiences. His research and practice are complemented by a background creating professional development workshops and coursework on information organization, digital libraries, museum informatics, and information architecture.
Richard holds a Ph.D. and Masters in Library and Information Science from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign along with a MA in History and Museum Studies from the University of Delaware.
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.
Congratulations, Richard!
Congratulations Richard! Good to see you at OCLC