HathiTrust Names Mike Furlough New Executive Director

This following HathiTrust announcement was made earlier today.

The HathiTrust Board of Governors is pleased to announce the appointment of Mike Furlough as the Executive Director of HathiTrust. Furlough comes to HathiTrust from The Pennsylvania State University, where he is currently Associate Dean for Research and Scholarly Communications. Furlough has more than a dozen years of experience leading initiatives in digital scholarship, content stewardship, and scholarly communications, and has served for the last nine months as an inaugural member of HathiTrust’s Program Steering Committee.
Furlough will begin his tenure as Executive Director on May 19.
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“We are thrilled to welcome Mike Furlough to the leadership of HathiTrust,” said Brian E. C. Schottlaender, chair of the HathiTrust Executive Director Search Committee and The Audrey Geisel University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego. “Mike’s deep commitment to scholarship, and demonstrated abilities to build partnerships, innovate in new scholarly areas, and develop and execute a strategic agenda make him well-placed to sit at the helm of this growing and dynamic organization. We very much look forward to working with Mike in his new role.”
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“This is a fantastic time to join HathiTrust, and I’m honored to have this opportunity to lead it,” said Furlough. “HathiTrust has dramatically increased access to the published record, and created a membership structure that governs a shared, distributed infrastructure for preservation and innovative use. We’re poised now to build upon those achievements, and transform the ways that research libraries collaborate to produce knowledge. I’m eager to get started.”
As Associate Dean for Research and Scholarly Communications at Penn State, Furlough has overseen the development of programs to improve access to and innovative use of rare materials and special collections, support research data curation and e-records management, and promote campus publishing initiatives. Most recently, he oversaw the creation of ScholarSphere, a preservation service for Penn State research and scholarship, and the initial development of ArchiveSphere for archival materials, both developed jointly by the Libraries and Penn State’s Information Technology Services. Prior to his position as Associate Dean, Furlough was Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communications at Penn State and Director of Digital Research and Instructional Services at the University of Virginia.

Read the Complete Announcement
Furlough is replacing John Wilkin who left HathiTrust and the U. of Michigan [he served as Associate University Librarian for Publishing] in August 2013.
Wilkin is now Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
See Also: Mike Furlough’s Personal Blog, “On Furlough”
See Also: Associate Dean for Research and Scholarly Communications Info Page at Penn St. University
See Also: Selection of Papers and Presentations by Mike Furlough (via PSU’s ScholarSphere Institutional Repository)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Journal Articles, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access, Preservation, Publishing, Scholarly Communications