Contact: Kathlin Smith
202-939-4754
Washington, DC, April 9, 2014-The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has appointed John Unsworth CLIR Distinguished Presidential Fellow. Unsworth is vice provost, university librarian, and chief information officer at Brandeis University.
Unsworth’s research interests are in digital humanities, scholarly communication, the history of books and publishing, and twentieth-century American literature. He chaired the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which published Our Cultural Commonwealth in 2006. Since then, Unsworth has helped direct three projects focused on text-mining in humanities digital libraries. The most recent is an ongoing project involving faculty and librarians at the University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Michigan, and Brandeis, to develop a virtual research center that provides computational access to all of the material in the HathiTrust, most of which was generated in the Google Books Project.
During his one-year appointment, Unsworth will focus on community building on behalf of the CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowship program.
“John Unsworth has provided rigorous and compelling leadership for the humanities and higher education as it evolves in the digital era,” said CLIR President Chuck Henry. “His scholarship, insight, and pivotal professional appointments have guided many of us as we engage with new technologies and their implications for the academy. I am delighted he will work with CLIR and help mentor our postdoctoral fellows as they assume leadership roles within our extended community.”
“I have been a supporter of the CLIR fellowship program since I was at the University of Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where we supported the online educational component of the fellowship program, taught by Elliott Shore,” said Unsworth. “I’ve seen a number of important careers shaped by participation in this program, and I am very pleased that at Brandeis, Library and Technology Services now has Margarita Corral as our first CLIR/DLF postdoc-she’s been a great representative of the program, and she has brought to our library exactly the kind of expertise and innovation that these postdocs are known for. It will be a pleasure to help Chuck and his team build this community over the coming year.”
CLIR is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning. It aims to promote forward-looking collaborative solutions that transcend disciplinary, institutional, professional, and geographic boundaries in support of the public good.
