For Immediate Release
January 30, 2007
For more information contact:
Sarah Segura
Association of Research Libraries
(202) 296-2296
sarah@arl.org
Washington, DC—The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has appointed Neil Rambo as ARL Visiting Program Officer to pursue ARL’s agenda regarding library support for research and e-science. Rambo is currently Associate Director of Health Sciences Libraries, University of Washington, Seattle. The ARL Visiting Program Officer assignment is half-time for the next two years and begins March 1, 2007.
Simultaneously Rambo is taking on new responsibilities at the University of Washington as Director of Cyberinfrastructure Initiatives and Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for Biosciences and e-Science. The assignments at ARL and University of Washington are designed to reinforce one another and provide synergy between institutional and community-wide perspectives on the same important set of issues.
Rambo recently chaired a University of Washington Libraries task force to identify strategies for library support for the bioscience community. He was also a member of the ARL Research Libraries Leadership Fellows program in 2004–2006. An active member of the Medical Library Association, Rambo also holds faculty positions as an affiliate instructor in two departments at the University of Washington: the Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics and the Department of Health Services, School of Public Health and Community Medicine.
Rambo’s assignment for ARL will contribute to the Research, Teaching, and Learning (RTL) program recently established at the Association following a strategic planning process. He will work closely with the ARL Task Force on Library Support for E-Science, chaired by Wendy Lougee, University Librarian, University of Minnesota; with the newly named ARL Program Director of Research, Teaching, and Learning, Crit Stuart; and with other ARL program staff. ARL expects that, together, this team of talented librarians will advance the following aspects of the ARL agenda:
Informing the ARL membership about e-science issues
Identifying opportunities and recommending strategies for developing relationships with various, scientific, government agencies and other key stakeholders, such as scientific societies
Building an understanding of the needs and experiences of scientists and researchers in various disciplines who are using electronic collections of scientific data
Recommending approaches to addressing issues related to the curation of long-lived digital data, including the handling of simulations and storage of massive data sets
Engaging ARL members in the development of new roles for libraries as e-science infrastructure and service needs emerge at research institutions and promoting the contributions of research libraries in this arena
Identifying the skills needed as information professionals move into the emerging e-science landscape and encouraging the development of information professionals prepared to assume new roles
Beginning on March 1, Neil Rambo may be reached at neil@arl.org.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is located on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.