DUBLIN, Ohio, 12 April 2024—OCLC Global Council has elected Xuemao Wang, Dean of Libraries and the Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian for Northwestern University, and re-elected Anja Smit, Director of DANS, an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Dutch Research Council, to the OCLC Board of Trustees.
Global Council delegates elected the trustees during their March meeting. New trustees officially take their seats on the Board in November. There are nine librarians from five countries currently serving on the 15-member OCLC Board of Trustees.
Xuemao Wang is the Dean of Libraries, and the Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian for Northwestern University. In his role, Wang oversees and facilitates the vision and strategies for the University Libraries. He has more than 30 years of diverse library and information technologies, services, and leadership experience, with a career that spans the public, academic, large library consortium, and international library worlds. He has held global leadership positions in the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), American Library Association (ALA), Center for Research Libraries (CRL), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), HathiTrust, SPARC, and OhioLINK.
Wang is frequently invited to international conferences to speak on topics of digital scholarship, digital humanities, and library strategic planning. Prior to working at Northwestern, he served as the Vice Provost for Digital Scholarship, Dean and University Librarian of the University of Cincinnati. He has held leadership positions at Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, the Metropolitan New York Library Council, Queens Borough Public Library, and worked as an academic librarian in China early in his career. He was elected to OCLC Global Council in 2021.
Anja Smit is Director of DANS Dutch national centre of expertise and repository for research data. She joined DANS in July 2022 following an international career of over 30 years in library management and library automation. Previously, she served as University Librarian at the Radboud University, Maastricht University, and most recently at Utrecht University. She also worked with Academic Libraries in New England, in the United States, as an Executive Consultant at NELINET (now Lyrasis).
On behalf of DANS, Smit is active in the National Open Science Program and in several national and international research data infrastructures, and works closely together with academic libraries on this topic. She is active in national and international library networks, including as Secretary General in the LIBER Board. In addition, she is a member of the Board of Bibliotheekservice Passend Lezen (National Library for the Blind), and Board member of the Utrecht Archive on behalf of the National Government.
Smit served on OCLC Global Council beginning in 2010, was elected Vice-President/President Elect of Global Council in 2014, and served as President in 2015-2016. She was first elected to a four-year term on the Board in 2020, before her re-election. She holds an MA from Utrecht University in Dutch Literature.
The OCLC Board of Trustees guides the vision of OCLC, shaping its strategy and goals. The Board also fulfills the fiduciary duty of protecting OCLC’s shared assets and investments. In addition, the Board is responsible for recruiting and working with the OCLC President and CEO, and for monitoring the organization through a dedicated audit process.
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