Elections for the Library Publishing Coalition Board open today and will continue through Friday, February 28. Instructions for voting will be sent to each member institution’s voting representative. This year there are four openings for 3-year terms. The candidates are:
Corinne Guimont, Virginia Tech
Bio
Corinne Guimont is the Associate Director of Publishing and Digital Scholarship at Virginia Tech (VT) and oversees Virginia Tech Publishing. Corinne works with faculty and students to create digital publications utilizing a variety of tools and platforms. She has a background in Information Science, Digital Humanities, and commercial e-textbook publishing. Corinne also led an initiative to create VT Domains, VT’s Domain of One’s Own program to provide support for interactive digital scholarship.
Corinne has served on the LPC Research Committee, Preservation Task Force, and is currently chairing the Program Committee. Additionally, Corinne is currently serving as the co-facilitator for the University Based Publishing Futures Knowledge Sharing working group. She has also served on the NASIG Digital Preservation Model License Subgroup and co-authored the Digital Preservation Model Policy to help publishers create their own preservation policies. Corinne was the recipient of the 2024 LPC Exemplary Service Award.
Candidate statement
I have been a part of the LPC community since attending my first forum in 2018. Being a part of the LPC community has helped me grow in my role at Virginia Tech and as a Library Publisher through different professional development opportunities such as webinars, workshops, community calls, the annual forum, and the peer mentoring program. I would like to share the knowledge I have gained to support and shape the future of LPC. I am excited to see existing initiatives continue to grow like the annual documentation month and LPC’s key involvement in the University Base Publishing Futures group.
The LPC community is full of amazing people who are all incredibly supportive and knowledgeable. By serving on the LPC Board, I aim to provide others with the same support structure that has shaped so many of our careers. With this support structure, I also hope to help grow and expand open access publishing through libraries. If elected to the board, I will support the existing and future initiatives that allow our community to continue to grow and thrive.
Statement of anti-racist practice
I acknowledge that systemic racism exists in all aspects of our lives and work and continues to create barriers for the communities of underrepresented voices. While I believe many areas of academia and scholarly communication are pushing against these barriers and striving to make changes, it is important that we acknowledge that much of our work is built upon centuries of academic traditions before us that did not acknowledge oppressive structures. I believe that LPC has actively implemented practices to encourage community members to recognize and reflect on these practices and will continue to do so. I personally, have benefited from the space provided by LPC to reflect on my own anti-racist practices and seek opportunities to bring that reflection to my day-to-day work. In my work, I strive to make all publications accessible to as many readers and users as possible through following best practices for both open access and accessibility. And I aim to support authors and researchers in sharing voices and views from all different perspectives and disciplines.
Liz Hamilton, Northwestern University Libraries
Bio
Liz Hamilton is the Copyright Librarian at Northwestern University Libraries, where she provides copyright education to the university community through workshops, instruction, consultations, and more. Within the Libraries, she works on the copyright aspect of projects like the digitization of collections, creation of faculty-run journals and OER, the institutional repository, open access advocacy, and more. Previously, Liz held a variety of roles at Northwestern University Press, including six years in a joint position shared between the Press and the Libraries. At the Press, she coordinated the open access release of outstanding backlist titles through the Mellon-funded Humanities Open Book program and library-funded Knowledge Unlatched, negotiated subsidiary rights and permissions agreements, and generally consulted on copyright issues in publishing. Liz also promoted partnerships between the two organizations. She holds an MLIS from Dominican University, a bachelor’s degree in Religion from Oberlin College, and is a 2016 graduate of Harvard University’s “CopyrightX.”
Liz has been an active LPC member since 2016, serving on and then chairing the Library Publishing Directory and Professional Development Committees. She also worked on the LPC/AUPresses University-Based Publishing Futures statement.
Candidate statement
I first became aware of the Library Publishing Coalition when I was an assistant at Northwestern University Press and the project was in its infancy. I was intrigued by the concept of library publishing, which was new to me at the time. Since then, I’ve been lucky to support library publishing both locally at my institution and through LPC committee service. I’m interested in taking the next step and serving on the Board because I want to continue to contribute to the organization at a deeper level.
In addition to LPC committee service, I’ve chaired the AUPresses Library Relations Committee and University Information Policy Officers (UIPO) Events Committee, and I’m currently on the Board of Directors of UIPO. These three organizations support the sharing of information from different angles; AUPresses and LPC focus on publishing while UIPO focuses on copyright and information policy in academic libraries. I would bring a unique perspective to Board service from working at the intersection of these three groups.
If elected to the Board, I would work to encourage collaborations between LPC and AUPresses, and between libraries and university presses more generally. I’m passionate about library-press collaboration; I truly believe libraries and university presses are working toward the same goal: making scholarship available to a wide audience. This is why I volunteered to work on writing the University-Based Publishing Futures statement and the AUPresses Library Relations Committee; I think we’re stronger together and can learn a lot from each other.
Statement of anti-racist practice
I strive to incorporate anti-racist practice into my work, but I know I have a long way to go. As a cis white woman in a field that centers cis white women, I have a lot of privilege and have benefitted from it over the course of my career. It’s really important to me to use that power to work against racism and center diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in all of my work.
Some of the projects I’ve worked on that have strong DEIA components are serving on the BTAA eBook Pilot Project Implementation Plan Development Team, to develop a plan for an eBook collection of 100 backlist titles from BTAA university presses on topics of strategic importance to DEIA; organizing the panel “Diversity Initiatives in Libraries and Publishing: What Can We Learn from Each Other?” at the Library Publishing Forum 2020 when I chaired the AUPresses Library Relations Committee; and joining groups within my library like the Decentering Whiteness Steering Committee, Diversity Interest Group and Accessibility Interest Group. If elected to the Board, I would continue to center DEIA in our work and look for ways we as an organization can be more inclusive.
Ariana Santiago, University of Houston
Bio
Ariana Santiago is the Head of Open Education Services at the University of Houston Libraries, where she provides leadership for the advancement of open education to support student success. She collaborates on the development of services and resources that support the adoption, creation, and publication of open educational resources, including through open pedagogical practices. Ariana is a graduate of the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, an editor for the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE), and a presenter for the ACRL Roadshow on OER & Affordability. She has previously served on the SPARC Steering Committee and the SPARC Open Education Advisory Group. Prior to working in open education, Ariana was an instruction librarian focusing on information literacy for undergraduate students. She received an M.A. in Library and Information Science from the University of South Florida and an M.A. in Applied Learning and Instruction from the University of Central Florida.
Candidate statement
My first involvement with the Library Publishing Coalition was attending the Library Publishing Forum in 2019, when I was still quite new to my first role that involved library publishing. I immediately found LPF to be a welcoming environment with a program that was engaging and incredibly useful in my day-to-day work. Since that time, LPF has become my must-attend professional development event every year thanks to the community and learning opportunities, and I have presented at the Forum in 2020 and 2024. I am interested in serving on the LPC Board so that I can play a role in supporting the work of LPC, an organization that prioritizes the needs of its community, provides valuable resources and learning opportunities, and communicates transparently. I would bring to this role my experience and expertise in open education and OER publishing, along with my interest in library publishing more broadly, and strengths in collaborative problem-solving. I believe in the LPC mission that enhances the impact and sustainability of open scholarship and supports the people who do this work, and I would be committed to advancing this mission through serving on the LPC Board.
Daniel Tracy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Bio
Daniel Tracy is Head, Scholarly Communication and Publishing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In that role he oversees librarians and staff working with the library-based press, the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN), as well as the institutional repository (IDEALS), a researcher information management system (Illinois Experts), copyright, digital humanities services, and general open access or scholarly communication issues. In his direction of IOPN, he has helped evolve a service model oriented towards novel digital humanities publications and increasingly open textbooks as well as support for UIUC-affiliated scholarly journals. This includes partnership with the Department of African-American Studies on the Mellon-funded AFRO-Publishing Without Walls 2 grant to foster digital publishing skills and outputs in black studies, and supporting recent university and state-funded grant programs for publication of open textbooks. In his research, he writes about user experience and user needs with digital publications and publishing systems, and increasingly for scholarly communication more broadly.
Candidate statement
As a librarian, I have been engaged with the Library Publishing Coalition since its first forum in Kansas City in 2014, and more directly had responsibilities for publishing services in my professional role since 2018. I’ve been excited to see library work in this area grow, and to see the LPC grow into key hub for pushing that work forward across our organizations. I’ve served previously on LPC’s Research Committee (including serving as chair for a year) and Awards Committee, and would embrace the opportunity to step into a new role on the LPC Board.
Library publishing is essential to the growth of scholar-driven open access publishing models, particularly diamond open access. I also think, at our best, we have a lot of potential to contribute to the open source publishing software ecosystem in terms of librarians’ understanding and research into how people access and use information resources. As a board member, I would look forward to contributing to an organization that has helped librarians advance their professional development and practice on publishing-related issues.
Statement of anti-racist practice
In my role on the LPC’s Research Committee, I worked to kick off and advance previously recommended work towards the LPC Roadmap for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility item related to updating the LPC research agenda to address DEIA issues, work that I hope to see come to fruition along with other aspects of the roadmap. In my librarianship work I have worked with our Department of African-American Studies on efforts to further digital publishing capacity in black studies. This work is important, even more so in a current climate that has become more challenging to do this work in our organizations. There are real and worsening challenges scholars now face with overt top-down censorship efforts as well as harassment campaigns towards scholars that do work in these areas. As librarians and as publishers, we need to be committed to freedom of access to published research and freedom of researchers to do their work without interference from those who seek to distort it. As a white, cis male, I also know that I’m in a relatively privileged position and may not always have the best answers, and I aspire to always listen to and amplify others’ voices on these issues to make better decisions in my own practice.