Schottlaender Wins Top Award from American Library Association


Brian E. C. Schottlaender, The Audrey Geisel University Librarian at UC San Diego, has been named the 2015 winner of the American Library Association’s Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award. Schottlaender, will receive a cash award and citation during the 2015 ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco this June.
Named in honor of one of the pioneers of library automation, the Atkinson Award recognizes an academic librarian who has made significant contributions in the area of library automation or management and has made notable improvements in library services or research.

“Brian is a visionary giant in the Hugh Atkinson mold,” said Nancy J. Gibbs, Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award committee chair for ALA and former head of the Acquisitions Department at Duke University. “He has eloquently articulated a vision for the 21st century academic library while finding balance with the need for physical resources, services, staff, and space. He understands we must work collaboratively in order to address the most challenging concerns facing libraries today. The Hugh Atkinson Award recognizes risk taking as a value in library management and Brian has demonstrated taking calculated risks that have proven transformational for libraries. This is evident in just a few of the initiatives he has shepherded: the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST); Hathi Trust, Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance, and Chronopolis, an effort in extensible digital preservation.”

“Brian has served as president of ALA/ALCTS and is currently the ALA Councilor from that division,” continued Gibbs. “He has served as president of the Association of Research Libraries and has recently been elected chair of the new Board of Governors of the Hathi Trust. In each instance Brian has brought his commitment to the library community, helping to restructure and provide a vision for the future, shaping ideas into outcomes. His commitment to academic libraries, scholarly research and the library community as a whole are truly impressive. He can always be counted on to provide leadership, collaboration, and a keen understanding of the shifts occurring today  as libraries address solutions to shared problems for the future.”

Schottlaender, UC San Diego’s University Librarian since 1999, was an early adopter of collaborative, cutting-edge initiatives and technologies to advance digitization and digital preservation on a national and global scale.  He is immediate Past Chair of the Board of Governors of HathiTrust, a consortium of universities—led by the University of California and the University of Michigan— that is building one of the largest online collections of books ever assembled.  He is also an inaugural member of the Board of the Digital Preservation Network, and the UC San Diego Library was the first in Southern California to partner with Google on its global book digitization project. Schottlaender has also played a leadership role in building the Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance—an international consortium of more than 30 major academic libraries—to facilitate user access to scholarly research materials from and across the Pacific.
He serves on numerous other boards, including  the Board of Trustees of OCLC; the Board of Directors of the Association for Research Libraries, and the Executive Committee of the UC San Diego-based San Diego Supercomputer Center. Schottlaender received his B.A. in German Literature, ampla cum laude, from the University of Texas at Austin, and his M.L.S. from Indiana University. Prior to joining UC San Diego, he held librarian positions at UCLA, University of Arizona, and Indiana University.

An active researcher, Schottlaender is currently Investigator for two Mellon Foundation grants, one to develop a distributed, shared journals repository (WEST), and the other to create a next-generation suite of software tools for managing archival collections (ArchivesSpace). He also directs Chronopolis, a Library of Congress-supported initiative funded by the Digital Preservation Network to build the infrastructure needed to collect and preserve at-risk digital information for the long term.

Over the last decade, Schottlaender has been the recipient of numerous awards for his leadership and accomplishments in the Library world, including the American Library Association’s Melvil Dewey Medal (2010) for “creative leadership of a high order,” and the ALA’s Ross Atkinson Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) for “extraordinary service in the field of collections management.”