Washington DC—The Association of Research Libraries has appointed Christine Avery a Visiting Program Officer (VPO) to work with the 21st Century Research Library Collections Task Force, effective January 2011. Avery is Head of the University College Libraries and Collection Development Coordinator for Commonwealth Campus Libraries at Penn State University.

In her role as VPO, Avery will collaborate with the task force’s Chairs, Deborah Jakubs (Duke) and Thomas Leonard (California, Berkeley). The task force is charged with developing an action plan that promotes a new understanding of the content and emerging functions that research libraries provide in the networked environment. Her primary responsibility will be to help the task force to determine the best means and modes for developing a new vision of research library collections content and services among the ARL leadership and membership and for communicating a new vision to stakeholders beyond the ARL community. The task force will work on specific support strategies to enable member libraries to pursue joint initiatives to reshape content collections through existing and new collaborations.

Avery joined the University Libraries at Penn State in 1990 and was previously Head of Reference and User Services at the University of Wyoming. In her work at Penn State, Avery manages 14 of the campus libraries located across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and is co-leader of the Libraries Collection Development Council. Avery was an ARL Research Library Leadership Fellow in 2007-09 and is an active member of EDUCAUSE. She received her MLS from the University of Texas, a MS in Applied Social Research from Texas Christian University, and BS in Sociology from Texas A&M University.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 126 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at http://www.arl.org/ .

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