Elaine Westbrooks
University of Minnesota
Director of Information Technology
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Keynote speaker Elaine L. Westbrooks has been the Vice Provost of University Libraries and University Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since August 2017. She is responsible for the leadership and general administration of the University Libraries which includes 9 libraries with approximately 300 librarians, archivists, and staff.
From 2014-2017 Westbrooks was the Associate University Librarian for Research at the University of Michigan. Westbrooks’ served as the Associate Dean of Library Operations, 2008-2012, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. From 2000-2008, she held a variety of positions at Cornell University Library, including Head of Metadata Services. Westbrooks started her career as a Latin American Cataloger and Digital Research Librarian at the University of Pittsburgh where she earned her B.A. and MLIS.
Westbrooks is a member of the Association of Research Libraries Scholars and Scholarship Committee, the Executive Committee of Triangle Research Libraries Network, the Digital Public Library of America Board of Directors, and the HathiTrust Board of Governors. She co-edited Academic Library Management: Case Studies with Tammy Nickelson Dearie and Michael Meth in 2017. Because of Westbrooks expertise and leadership in scholarly communications and the crisis of academic publishing, she has been interviewed by numerous media outlets, including Vox, Inside Higher Education, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Westbrooks has also emerged as a leading thinker on issues related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice in academic Libraries. She has presented her research at the Digital Library Federation, Coalition for Networked Information, and the Association of College and Research Libraries.