By Barbara I. Dewey, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications

Colleagues, we are getting ready for the very important associate dean candidate interviews. I know I can count on you to provide an excellent Penn State experience for each and every candidate. Thank you in advance for doing so. I also want to remind everyone that the searches are confidential and no information should be shared externally out of respect for the candidates and the process. These searches are time consuming but critical for us as we move to the next exciting era for Penn State Libraries. Let me or the search committee chairs know if you have questions at any point.

I just returned from a week of national meetings in Washington DC. Ben Goldman and I attended the APTrust Annual Meeting where work is underway to build a shared digital preservation infrastructure. I next attended the ARL Annual Meeting where I met many new directors of large research libraries. ARL is in the midst of a major turnover due to a large number of retirements. ARL is also in the process of developing a new strategic plan and a “rebranding” of the organization. Linda Friend attended the ARL Forum on monographic publishing. I also attended the first annual meeting of HathiTrust. Mike Furlough led the meeting in excellent fashion. HathiTrust now contains 12 million digital volumes. Penn State is considered a leader and important contributor in all of these organizations.