Rachael Samberg has accepted our offer of the position of Scholarly Communications Officer.
Rachael comes to us from the Stanford Law Library. She is completing her sixth year there as a reference librarian and lecturer in law. Before that she spent seven years as an intellectual property attorney at Fenwick & West LLP in San Francisco. She has her J.D. from Duke University, an MLIS from the University of Washington, and a BS in Biology and Classics from Tufts University.
From these highlights, you can see that Rachael brings both considerable IP legal experience, librarian experience, and teaching expertise to lead our growing commitment to becoming a leader in the worldwide movement to transform the scholarly communications landscape. She will put all these skills to great use, as she advises faculty, grad students and other researchers on how to use scholarly materials in their research and publications, how to disseminate their findings in ways that broaden its reach and impact, and how our campus can engage in programs and practices that hasten the transition from a closed-access, subscription based publishing world to one with open access and lower costs.
Another area in which Rachael has developed expertise is not as directly relevant to her new position, but will surely be of interest to a number of our folks: legal archives. Rachael has been chair of the Archives Committee of the Northern California Association of Law Libraries since 2011, and has published several articles on preserving legal history and collecting state court files. I’m imagining she’ll be spending her lunch breaks noodling around in the basement of Bancroft where we keep the California land case archives.
Jeff MacKie-Mason
University Librarian