Robert Hudson, University Librarian at Boston University, Announces Retirement

From BU Today:

“The future is right now,” says longtime University Librarian Robert E. Hudson. “You don’t stop. It’s happening.”
After decades of overseeing the BU libraries and their transition to the digital era, Hudson is retiring from the University, effective next summer. A University search committee has been formed to seek his successor.
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In recent years, Hudson has been a prime mover in implementing OpenBU, an open access repository aimed at providing the widest possible archiving, online sharing, and dissemination of research and scholarship by BU faculty, staff, and students. Key steps have been adoption of an Open Access Policy in 2009 that makes scholarly work by BU faculty and staff available online for free as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship isn’t used for profit, and a shift in policyfrom one that requires faculty to opt in to provide open access to their scholarly articles to one that requires them instead to opt out if they don’t want to allow open access, adopted in 2015.
“Research shows that open access articles are more widely cited. They expedite the passage of the information through institutions, academies, professions,” he says.
Hudson has worked in various library capacities at BU since 1979. He was appointed director of University libraries in 1992 and has been University Librarian since 2007. The University libraries comprise 23 libraries containing more than 4 million physical and electronic titles and 58,000 periodical subscriptions, both physical and electronic. The “monumental task of documenting everything we have digitally and keeping it going” is one of the key challenges going forward, he says.
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The University has appointed a 12-member search committee comprising faculty and librarians, chaired by Tracy Schroeder, vice president of information services and technology, to find Hudson’s successor. The committee is scheduled to recommend two or three qualified applicants by March 30, 2018, with final selection to be made by Morrison and Robert A. Brown, BU president.

Learn More About Robert Hudson’s Accomplishments in the Complete Article

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