Staff and Partners
The two-year (2023-2024) project is being managed at the University of California Davis Library and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Rice Majors, the associate university librarian for scholarly resources at UC Davis, is the project’s principal investigator and chair of its Steering Committee. Erik Mitchell, the Audrey Geisel University Librarian at UC San Diego, and Günter Waibel, the associate vice provost and executive director of the California Digital Library, are serving as co-principal investigators for the project.
The Steering Committee is working in partnership with a leadership team that includes UC faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and librarians, along with senior personnel from HathiTrust and an expert in ebook user experience from the Digital Public Library of America. Four Project Teams are conducting detailed research into the four dimensions — user requirements, legal research, collection assessment, technology requirements — within a framework of interaction and inquiry across the dimensions. The goal ideally is a service design that responds to opportunities and constraints posed by all four of the research dimensions.
The entire team is drawing on HathiTrust’s empirical understanding of the current digital library landscape, based on the experience of its 200+ academic and research library members, and we will continue to coordinate closely with HathiTrust to lay the groundwork for a strong potential role in implementation. Project team members are also participating in the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and its Working Group on Interoperable Systems for Controlled Digital Lending to coordinate with NISO-proposed standards.
Library Community Group
To ensure the service models to be developed are broadly applicable, the Project LEND team consults periodically with an advisory group of representatives from academic libraries outside the University of California.
- University of Colorado Boulder: Robert McDonald, Dean of the University Libraries and Senior Vice Provost of Online Education
- Swarthmore College: Anne Houston, Director of Libraries and College Librarian
- University of San Diego: Theresa Byrd, Dean of University Library
- University of Virginia: Carmelita Pickett, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources and Content Strategy
- University of Michigan: Donna Hayward, Interim Dean of Libraries
- University of Michigan: Bryan Skib, Associate University Librarian for Collections