Many of HathiTrust’s members and partners have gotten to know our assistant director, Jeremy York, very very well. He has been involved in so many areas of HathiTrust’s development over the last seven years that it’s not possible to fully document his contributions. Many of you have worked with him to resolve an access issue, or to submit your holdings, or to process your membership application, or to ingest your locally digitized collection, or to offer an idea for how we could do something better. While doing that, he’s also been working with our general counsel, drafting policy and process, documenting our activity, overseeing our user support services, coordinating with the Research Center on data transfers, writing the monthly update, and just basically evangelizing for HathiTrust. Through all of that he’s been thinking deeply about how HathiTrust can improve and grow with new services and programs. He’s extremely dedicated to the partnership--I don’t know if I’ve met anyone so thoroughly committed to the success of and organization.
Nevertheless, Jeremy has decided that the time has come for him to leave HathiTrust and pursue new activities. Ultimately he intends to return to graduate school and pursue a PhD in information studies. In the meantime, he’s accepted a new position to manage a funded research grant on digital preservation and publicly funded data. His last day with HathiTrust will be June 23. We will all miss him but we will all be hearing from him in the years to come.
In a message to the membership, Jeremy wrote: "Over the last several years I have had the rare and very special opportunity to interact personally with so many of you, as HathiTrust has grown and more and more institutions have joined. It has really been my distinct honor to be exposed to and have such an intimate experience with the richness of our incredible community. Through visiting institutions, meeting you at conferences, interacting through the silver screen of webinars and over threaded lines of phone conferencing, I've witnessed and been able to participate in the tireless, invaluable work that libraries do to advance knowledge, support our communities, and make the world a better place. I've truly been inspired through my work with you and with HathiTrust. This inspiration has given me the desire to do further studies, but I am very grateful that I will continue to be a part of this community, working on the same challenges of preserving and providing access to the record of human knowledge, pursuing the same mission as we have pursued in HathiTrust. I'm very grateful for the time I have had working with HathiTrust, and proud to the sky of all that we have been able to accomplish. Thank you so much for everything, and I look forward to times when our paths will cross and we will have the opportunity to work together in the future."
Contacts: Mike Furlough (furlough@hathitrust.org)