Tenets of the Liberal Arts: Complex Thinking in the Digital Age
In January 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released Mosaic, the web browser that led to the Internet boom of the 1990s.
Elliott Shore
Biography
Elliott Shore has served as the executive director of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) since January 2013. In his first two years at ARL, Dr. Shore has helped envision and carry out a thoroughgoing and groundbreaking Strategic Thinking and Design process that resulted in ARL 2015+, new directions for the Association in areas that are intended to bring coherence to the digital world of research libraries and influence the ecosystem of higher education. To learn more about the ARL landscape, he conducted a North American listening tour of one-third of ARL member libraries. He has raised $1.3 million in grant funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He also co-conceived and implemented a complete restructuring of the Association’s administrative staff and functions. From 1997 to 2012, Dr. Shore served as the Constance A. Jones director of libraries and professor of history at Bryn Mawr College, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the US. In 2002, he was appointed chief information officer (CIO) of the college. As director of libraries, Dr. Shore modernized and streamlined library operations by combining departments, realigning collections appropriations, and adding new areas of collection development. He served as co-principal investigator on three grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation totaling $1 million. As CIO he reorganized the college’s library and computing operations into a single Information Services unit. He also overhauled the college’s core computing operations and significantly increased collaboration with neighboring Haverford College. In 2013, Bryn Mawr appointed Dr. Shore professor of history emeritus. Before arriving at Bryn Mawr, Dr. Shore was director of the Historical Studies-Social Science Library at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1985 to 1997. At IAS, he expedited processes for faculty and visiting scholars to access materials needed for their work, adopted computer-aided indexing and retrieval services, began teaching classes in using the World Wide Web one month after the release of Mosaic, and led the integration of linked information technologies across administrative units. In 1974, Dr. Shore began his career in libraries at Temple University as curator of the Contemporary Culture Collection. In this role, he developed one of the country’s largest collections of radical, underground, and alternative publications. With federal grant funding, he helped establish the collecting of these ephemeral works as a standard part of research library operations. In 1982 Dr. Shore was appointed history bibliographer, reference librarian, and assistant to the director, a position he held through 1984. Dr. Shore is active in the library profession. Among his numerous activities, he has been a leader in the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries program since its inception in 2003 and a CLIR Senior Presidential Fellow since 2008. He has served as a co-dean of the Leading Change Institute (formerly the Frye Leadership Institute) since 2012. Recent board and committee service by Dr. Shore includes the American Council on Education Board of Directors, Finance Committee (chair), and Executive Committee since 2014; the Wagner Free Institute of Science Advisory Board since 2014; the Committee on Coherence at Scale in Higher Education (CCSHE) since 2012 and the CCSHE Steering Committee since 2013; and the University of Virginia Rare Book School’s Advisory Committee of Prominent Bibliographic Citizens since 2012. Delivering numerous papers and workshops, Dr. Shore speaks and publishes widely, most recently with a focus on the future of research libraries and the need for coherence at scale in higher education. Notably, he participated in the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Institutional Innovation in July 2014. Dr. Shore earned a PhD in history from Bryn Mawr College, an MS in library science from Drexel University, an MA in international history from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA in history from Temple University.EDUCAUSE Publications
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Coherence at Scale and the Research Library of the Future
The dilemmas that higher education library and IT professionals are now facing and the way we characterize them—centralizing or decentralizing—or the ways we distinguish between them—the library or the IT department—have very much to do with the origins of the modern research university and its growth and development in the period that many people call the age of modernity.
EDUCAUSE Presentations
EDUCAUSE Involvement
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CHEMA Executives
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ER Department Editors
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Information Resources Management JB Book