Susan Barnes Whyte, library and educational media services director at Linfield College, has been appointed to the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC).
She will serve as senior advisor and director of the Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Research. The new initiative is designed to provide innovative, cost-effective ways to increase the utility and availability of digital resources for teaching and research at CIC member institutions. Barnes Whyte will remain in her position at Linfield while she manages the initiative.
Approximately 48 member institutions will be selected to join the Consortium to improve teaching and learning, enhance faculty and student/faculty research, and streamline administrative capabilities through a uniform system. The project is made possible through a $2.2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. CIC will partner with Artstor, a nonprofit organization created by the Mellon Foundation in 2001 to serve the educational community in its arts collections, to administer the Consortium.
“The Council is pleased that Susan Barnes Whyte has agreed to direct this important project,” said CIC President Richard Ekman. “With her expertise in librarianship, as well as her experience teaching information literacy and as a presenter for CIC’s Information Fluency in the Disciplines Workshops, I am certain that Susan will serve CIC and its members admirably. I look forward to working with her again.”
The members of the Consortium will convene annually for three years to share ideas, collections, research projects and teaching strategies, beginning in September 2015. Each institution in the Consortium will select at least one collection that could be made more valuable and used more frequently if it were stored and shared via a networked solution. The institution then will identify a college librarian and the staff or faculty member most knowledgeable about that collection. This campus team will work with similar teams from other CIC institutions, together with CIC and Artstor staff, to use Shared Shelf, a cloud-based asset-management service, to manage and make use of the digital resources they create.
Tom Hellie, president of Linfield College, said he is delighted that Barnes Whyte was selected to direct the Consortium. “Susan has served Linfield with distinction in various capacities since 1990 and is a valued member of the community. Her work with CIC will complement the impact she already has had on the library community both nationally—as a board member for the Association of College and Research Libraries and as incoming chair of the Orbis Cascade Alliance—and globally as a member of the OCLC Members Council.” (OCLC is a global, nonprofit cooperative of thousands of libraries worldwide that work together to get information to people more quickly and efficiently.)
Barnes Whyte has been a librarian at Linfield since 1990. In addition to teaching in the mass communication department, she has been library and educational media services director at Linfield since 2000. She presents often at local, regional and national conferences and workshops. Barnes Whyte managed the planning, design and construction of the new library at Linfield, which opened in fall 2003. She attended the Frye Institute for Leadership in 2002 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Earlham College and a master’s degree of library science from Emory University.
