CNI Podcast: An Interview with Duane Webster, Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries

This 26 minute podcast features an interview with Duane Webster, Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries. Our conversation was recorded at the CNI 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Duane E. Webster is Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries, an organization representing 123 major research libraries in North America. The mission of ARL is to identify and influence forces affecting the future of research libraries in the process of scholarly communication.

Duane received his M.A.L.S. from the University of Michigan in 1964, and worked in research, public, and special libraries before joining ARL in 1970 to establish the ARL Office of Leadership and Management Services (OLMS).

Duane was appointed Executive Director of ARL in 1988. In this capacity, he has helped establish the ARL Office of Scholarly Communication in 1990; the Coalition for Networked Information co-sponsored by ARL and EDUCAUSE in 1990; and, most recently in 1998, SPARC - the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. All of these organizations are actively working to transform the current the current system of scholarly communication with the goal of moving toward a more sustainable, productive, and accessible system.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org