We are so terribly sad about the passing of our beloved colleague Deanna Marcum on August 16, 2022. Deanna was a humble and private person, so she would not want a lot of attention focused on her, but her impact on me and us here at ITHAKA is so profound that we must recognize and share it.
I first met Deanna in 1996, when she was the president of the Council of Library and Information Resources. She took me under her wing and introduced me to many librarians and helped to establish JSTOR as a credible partner for the library community. She was the best possible mentor, professional colleague, and friend. JSTOR’s success is therefore just one of her many legacies.
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Deanna leaves a stunning legacy in the scholarly and library community generally (she was awarded the Melvil Dewey Medal by the American Library Association in 2011), but as you can see her impact on ITHAKA has been both broad and deep. Putting her innumerable professional accomplishments aside, she approached everything she did with an absolute and total commitment to excellence and an abundance of grace. I will never know a more gracious person. We will be thinking about ways we might recognize her impact on ITHAKA in due course, but we will want to do that with care and sensitivity that respect Deanna’s humility and her desire that there not be undue attention paid to her.
The blog post continues with more by Kevin Guthrie along with reflections by Kate Wittenberg, Roger C. Schonfeld, Martin Kurzweil, Laura Brown, Catharine Bond Hill.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
