For immediate release
September 11, 2007
For more information, contact:
Julia Blixrud
Assistant Executive Director, External Relations
Association of Research Libraries
jblix@arl.org
Emory’s Lars Meyer Named ARL Visiting Program Officer
Washington, DC—Lars Meyer, Preservation Officer, Emory University Libraries, has been appointed Visiting Program Officer by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to assess the state of preservation programs in ARL libraries. ARL recruited Meyer to conduct the investigation in response to one of the recommendations from the Future of Preservation in ARL Libraries Workshop Planning Task Force. Over the next several months, he will be gathering quantitative and qualitative information on preservation activities in ARL libraries, working with ARL’s Office of Scholarly Communication and the Statistics and Measurement program. His time on the project has been underwritten by Emory University Libraries.
The ARL Board of Directors recently issued a statement affirming the importance of preservation for research libraries and recognizes that research libraries have a responsibility to invest in strong local and cooperative preservation programs. Duane Webster, ARL Executive Director, stated, “We are delighted to have Lars work with us to help gather evidence providing a more comprehensive picture of current programmatic preservation activities in ARL libraries.”
While at Emory, Meyer has established a preservation program for sound recordings and moving images, participated in digital preservation efforts, and is currently developing a new program, the Digital Curation Center. For six years he was at Columbia University as Assistant Director for Preservation Reformatting and he has also worked as an archaeologist, GIS technician, and archives assistant. Meyer has been at Emory since 2002 and, in addition to his preservation duties, he serves as German Studies Librarian and Storage Library Manager.
Meyer has chaired numerous committees and discussion groups in the Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) of the American Library Association. From 2000 to 2003 he served as member-at-large on the PARS Executive Committee. Also from 2000 to 2003, he was co-editor of Microform & Imaging Review. In 2003 he co-authored the RLG Guidelines to Support Microfilming for Digitization (Mountain View, CA: Research Libraries Group), and more recently, from 2004 to 2006, served on the working group that finalized ANSI/NISO Z39.87—2006 Data Dictionary—Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images. Currently, he is active in partnering with cultural institutions in metro Atlanta to establish a cooperative for disaster preparedness and response.
Meyer earned an MLIS at the University of Texas at Austin (1995) and a BA in anthropology and German from the University of California, Davis (1990).
Meyer may be contacted at Emory University at lmeyer2@emory.edu.
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/.
