The University of Oklahoma Libraries is pleased to announce that Carl Grant will be joining our team as the Associate Dean for Knowledge Services and Chief Technology Officer. Carl has an extensive background in the information industry and has worked for many years in the corporate enterprise that supports library services with leadership positions at Ex Libris, VTLS, Ameritech Library Services, and Innovative Interfaces. His experiences in these venues make Carl uniquely qualified to lead the University of Oklahoma Libraries into a new era of utilizing the latest technologies to facilitate learning and research at the university.

With the creation of this position, the University of Oklahoma Libraries is responding to a rapidly changing landscape in higher education and to evolving user expectations. Knowledge Services will integrate formerly discrete components in the library to achieve a more seamless user experiences when interacting with digital content. Traditional library departments such as Cataloging & Metadata and Library Systems will work together with new areas such as the digitization laboratory to enhance access to digital collections, to preserve digital data, and to examine library technology platforms that best meet the needs to of today’s scholars. Knowledge Services will also support learning, teaching and research through the creation of a collaborative commons.

Dean of Libraries, Rick Luce, notes, “As with all academic libraries, OU is experiencing a rapidly evolving and significant transformation in the way that students and faculty learn and teach, impacting the way our users need and expect support. We are becoming more engaged in the integration of information into the digital landscape in support of new pedagogy, in the role of digitization and preservation, and in supporting the infrastructure to manage the life cycle of multiple forms of information. Carl Grant will have key leadership responsibilities at the intersection of digital services and our transformation to a more user centric organization.”

Learn more about Carl’s thinking on a variety of library service and technology challenges at his blog, Thoughts from Carl Grant.