I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1973. In 1982, I received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University. My dissertation research focused on the political economy of artisanry in Guyana, South America. I also edited and published a collection of African-American folklore from the Hampton Institute in a volume entitled Strange Ways and Sweet Dreams.
In 2019, I retired from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as the Senior Program Officer for Scholarly Communications after 20 years of service. Over the period from 1999 to 2019, I was responsible for approximately 1500 grants to organizations around the world, but primarily in the United States, supporting the development, use, and preservation of digital content and tools in the humanities. These grants totaled nearly $750 million.
Before joining the Foundation, I served as the founding Director of the Digital Library Federation (1997-1999) and Associate University Librarian at Yale University (1993-1997). From 1982 to 1993, I also held a variety of other library and information technology positions at Yale. For example, as Director of Computing for the Yale School of Management (1984-1987), I was responsible for setting up the school's first personal computer laboratory. As Head of Systems in the Yale Library (1987-1993), I helped oversee the installation of Yale's first online integrated library system, and served as the principal investigator for Project Open Book, an effort supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore how to digitize books and serials originally microfilmed as part of the effort to preserve brittle books in the nation’s research libraries.
In 1995-96, I co-chaired the Task Force of the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group on the Archiving of Digital Information. I was the editor and a principal author of the Task Force's report. In 2005-2008, I served on the Library of Congress Section 108 Study Group. From 1999 to 2022, I served on the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). In November 2022, I became the inaugural CNI Senior Scholar. I currently serve as the President of the Engineering Information Foundation, a member of the Executive Advisory Council of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and a volunteer for DavidsonLearns. I am also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
For more details, see my CV.