Speaker Biographies

Francis X. Blouin

Francis X. Blouin Jr is Director of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan where he is also Professor of History and Professor in the School of Information. He came to the Bentley Library in 1974 and became its fourth director in 1981. Over the years he has directed a number of projects and seminars that have explored the intellectual foundations of archival work. These include: establishing a archives concentration in the then School of Library Science, a research fellowship program for the study of modern archives, compiling a comprehensive archival inventory of the historical documentation of the Holy See, leading along with colleague William Rosenberg a “Sawyer Seminar” on archives, documentation, and institutions of social memory, and working with the staff of the Bentley Library on an exchange program with the State Archives Administration of China now in its twelfth year. He has written a number books and articles that explore the meaning of archives and archival methodologies. He has taught a variety of courses in both history and information studies. Currently he is leading a team to explore the archival capture of e-mail on the campus of the University. He has held numerous leadership positions in the Society of American Archivists and the International Council on Archives. Currently he serves on the board of directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources. While working on the Vatican project he was on several occasions a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He was also a visiting scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Study in America at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota in 1978.

John Casteen III, Keynote Speaker
President of the University of Virginia
George M. Kaufman Presidential Professor
Professor of English

Kaufman Professor of English John Casteen became president of the University of Virginia in August 1990. As president, he has overseen innovations in academic programs, the successful restructuring of the University's relationship with the Commonwealth of Virginia, unprecedented successes in raising private funds and in building programs, major expansions of the University's physical plant and land holdings, internal reorganizations, and development of new international programs for students and faculty members. In this period, the University has been recognized for its overall quality (often ranked best among public universities and among the top twenty-five among all U.S. universities), for attracting and educating minority students, for the quality of undergraduate teaching, and for refinancing itself following historic reductions in state tax support at the beginning of the 1990s.

After teaching English at the University of California (Berkeley) and the University of Virginia, Mr. Casteen became Virginia's secretary of education in 1982. He served until 1985. While secretary, he directed reforms in both secondary and higher education, revamped Virginia's college desegregation efforts, and initiated programs of state support for research. From 1985 to 1990, he was president of the University of Connecticut.

Mr. Casteen has been a director of the American Council on Education, a director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, trustee and chair of the College Entrance Examination Board, commissioner of the Education Commission of the States, member of the Board of Control for the Southern Regional Education Board, commissioner of the New England Board of Higher Education, and chair of the Association of Governing Board’s council of presidents. From 1991 to 1993, he chaired the National Board on Oceans and Atmosphere.

In 1997, Mr. Casteen completed a term as chair of the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) as well as a term as president of SACS. In 2000-2002, he chaired the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). He recently completed a term as chair of the Association of American Universities (AAU). Mr. Casteen is currently a member of AAU’s Institutional Data Committee.

Mr. Casteen’s business career has included service as a director of Connecticut Bank and Trust Company (CBT) in 1986-1989—CBT was acquired by Fleet Bank, and as a member of CBT’s audit and corporate responsibility committees; as a director of the New England Education Loan Marketing Corporation (Nellie Mae) and the successor foundation (1988-1997 and 2000), and as a member of Nellie Mae’s executive committee; as a director of Sallie Mae (1999-2004), following the sale of Nellie Mae to SLMA, Inc.; as a director of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Connecticut, Inc., now a component of Anthem (1989-1990, resigned to move to Virginia), as a member of the audit and medical affairs committees, and as a director of Calico, a wholly owned subsidiary providing employee life insurance services for client corporations; as a director of the College Construction Loan Insurance Association (Connie Lee) and a member of the finance committee (1993-1997)—Connie Lee was acquired by AmBac in 1997; as a director of Allied Concrete Company, Charlottesville (1995-1998); as a director of Jefferson Bankshares, Inc., and Jefferson National Bank and chair of the executive compensation committee (1990-1997)—JBI was acquired by Wachovia in 1997; a director of the old and new Wachovia Corporation (1997-present), member and chair of its audit and compliance committees, and subsequently member and chair of the audit committee of the new corporation formed by the merger of Wachovia and First Union, currently serves on audit committee. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation; and member and chair of the Jefferson Science Associates, LLC. Currently, he serves as chair of Universitas 21 and is a member of the Board of Directors of U21 Global Pte Ltd.

Mr. Casteen was named the Outstanding Virginian of 1993. The state conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) presented its Jackson Davis Award to him in December 1993. In February 1996, he received the doctor honoris causa from the University of Athens in Greece. In 1998, he was named the University of Virginia’s outstanding alumnus of the year. In December 1998, he received the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences. In November 2002, Mr. Casteen was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention’s Presidents Leadership Group Award. The Virginia Society of the American Institute of Architects selected Mr. Casteen as the recipient of the Architecture Medal for Virginia Service in 2004.

Mr. Casteen holds three degrees in English from the University of Virginia (B.A. with high honors in 1965, M.A. in 1966, and Ph.D. in 1970). He writes short fiction as well as essays and papers in medieval literature, bibliography, and public policy. A collection of his short stories received the 1987 Mishima Award for fiction. He served as U.Va.’s dean of admissions from 1975 to 1982. Born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, he is married to Betsy Foote Casteen. They have five children.

Ellen S. Dunlap

Since 1992, Ellen S. Dunlap has been president of the American Antiquarian Society, a national research library of American history in Worcester, MA. Previously she was director of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia (1983-1992) and research librarian at the Humanities Research Center (now the Harry Ransom Center) at the University of Texas at Austin (1973-1983). A graduate of UT Austin, she received her masters degree in library science from that institution in 1974. Dunlap is currently chair of the Independent Research Libraries Association and a member of the board of Rare Book School. She is a past board member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (where she was president), the Research Libraries Group, and the Philadelphia Consortium of Special Collections Libraries which she helped to found in 1985.

Ted Genoways

Ted Genoways is the author of the nonfiction book Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet During the Lost Years of 1860–1862 (California, 2009) and co-editor of “Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings,” a web-based project under development with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Bullroarer (Northeastern, 2001), and Anna, Washing (Georgia, 2008). For his poetry, he has received a Pushcart Prize, the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Natalie Ornish Award, the Nebraska Book Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. His seven edited volumes include Joseph Kalar’s Papermill: Poems 1927–1935 (Illinois, 2006), Walt Whitman: The Correspondence (Iowa, 2004), and The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Chicago, 2001). As editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, he has received thirteen National Magazine Awards nominations and won in General Excellence, Single-Topic Issue, and Fiction. He is a contributing editor to Men’s Journal and Mother Jones and also has recent essays and reviews in Outside and the Washington Post Book World.

Eli Horowitz

Eli Horowitz is publisher at McSweeney's, the publishing house started by Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius). Over the past six years, he has edited books and stories by writers including Eggers, William Vollmann, Nick Hornby, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Adrian, Art Spiegelman, and Salvador Plascencia. Horowitz's design work has been honored by I.D., Print and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Before McSweeney's, he was employed as a carpenter and wrote science trivia questions tenuously linked to popular films. He was born in Virginia and now lives in San Francisco.

Katharine Kyes Leab

My introduction to special collections took place two years after the 1959 Charlottesville conference and was immortalized in the accompanying photograph. We were marched into the Rare Book Room at Smith College, frisked for writing instruments, directed to sit at a table and not touch anything, photographed, and marched back out. Never touched a book; never turned a page; not invited back.

Most of my working life has been spent in touching books and turning pages, perhaps in response to being thrown out of Eden. And (full disclosure) one of the triumphs of my young life came in the 1970s: as head of the Smith library’s Friends group, I persuaded the college librarian that she really did dare to ask the eminent bibliographer Ruth Mortimer to come from Harvard to Smith. Ruth revolutionized the Rare Book Room, welcoming students and using its resources to teach undergraduate courses, practices maintained by Martin Antonetti today.

In the meantime, I had made a brief detour through graduate school at Columbia and had become a reference-book trouble-shooter.  If a project had gobbled up years of, say, Ford Foundation money without producing a book, then I was assigned to make it happen, even if it meant assembling a group of Chinese graduate students and producing a book-length bibliography in Chinese.

One troubled reference book that was about to be shot was American Book Prices Current.  In 1972 the Leabs decided to take that one home.  We produced four annuals in two years to bring ABPC up to date, and we’ve produced ABPC ever since, first on 35 thousand 3x5 cards for each volume, then, from 1975, on  computers. And now ABPC is online, and the staff can work on it from anywhere in the world.  “Refer to dealers and American Book Prices Current” was the conclusion of the discussion on appraisal at Charlottesville in 1959, and ABPC remains the standard for determining fair market value.

Editing American Book Prices Current has meant that I could handle books and turn the pages of great treasures in auction houses all over the world.  In celebration, my husband, Dan, and I wrote The Auction Companion (1981).  In the 1980-82 period I also produced two interactive databases, Bookline: Utopia (which was ABPC on a phone line to Boston but the phone trunk lines weren’t very good so its life was short) and BAMBAM (Bookline Alert: Missing Books and Manuscripts).  BAMBAM ran for 13 years free-of-charge in hopes that a national institution would take it over, but nobody did.  However, it did shine a spotlight on the problem of theft from libraries.

As suited my station as one of the Usual Suspects of the late 20th-century book world, I wrote about books and auctions for trade and scholarly journals as well as for such commercial publications as 7 Days, The Wall Street Journal, Town and Country, the Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Times Book Review.   I also lectured about books and manuscripts and served as an expert in such legal cases as those involving the Nixon papers or the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. 

In the hopes of having more books to handle, I have served as head of the Publications Committee and Vice President of the Bibliographical Society of America.  And in hopes of having more books and manuscripts to see, Dan and I established the RBMS exhibition catalogue awards, known as the Leab awards.

Now you know why I chose to hand-deliver this biographical sketch to Arvid Nelsen.  In addition to his Charles Babbage Institute (heaven for a computer junkie), the Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota has all sorts of other wonderful books and manuscripts to see and to touch and to turn the pages.

Tod Lippy

Tod Lippy is the editor of Esopus magazine and president of the Esopus Foundation Ltd. He was the editor and co-founder of Scenario: The Magazine of Screenwriting Art (1994-­97), the publisher and co-editor of publicsfear magazine (1992-94), and a senior editor at Print magazine from 1990-1997.  His 2000 book, Projections 11: New York Film-Makers on Film-Making, was published by Faber & Faber.  Lippy’s 1999 short film, Cookies, was featured in over 20 film festivals in the U.S. and abroad.

In the past five years, Lippy has devoted himself to Esopus magazine and the Esopus Foundation. He has lectured extensively on Esopus at many educational and cultural institutions, including the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the School of Visual Arts, the Fashion Institute of Technology, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, New York’s Nightingale-Bamford School for Girls, the Elizabeth Irwin High School, and USC’s Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles.  He has been interviewed on the same subject for a number of journals, radio programs, and books, including Becoming a Graphic Designer (Wiley, 2005) and Fresh Dialogue: Making Magazines (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).

Beverly P. Lynch, Professor, UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies and Director of the UCLA Senior Fellows Program and the California Rare Book School

In 1972 Dr. Lynch was appointed the Executive Secretary of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.  During her tenure in ACRL  Lynch facilitiated four RBMS preconferences,  directed the revisions of the Standards for College Libraries and Community College Libraries, and the development of the first statement of Standards for University Libraries; she proposed and designed the first national ACRL conference; influenced the development of the ALA dues structure which gave division's their own dues; and directed the $ 500,000 project to enhance the leadership in the libraries serving the historically Black colleges and universities.

In 1977 Dr. Lynch was appointed University Librarian and Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, leading that library for twelve years.  She developed the library, designed originally to serve only as an undergraduate library, into a major research library which was admitted to membership in the Association of Research Libraries in 1988.

In 1989 Dr. Lynch was appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UCLA, becoming the school's fourth dean.  She guided the school in its revision of the master's degree curriculum and a strengthening and restructuring of the  Ph.D. program, designed the new building into which the school moved in September 1991, and strengthen the school's Senior Fellows program for research library directors.

In 2000 Dr. Lynch was appointed Interim President of the Center for Research Libraries (on leave from UCLA) and continued in that position until September 2001 when she returned to UCLA.  During her presidency of the Center she restructured the Center's finances, established the International Coalition of Newspapers project, designed a project that led to a new strategic plan for the Center, and created the organization leading to the Digital South Asia Library.

Long active in professional associations Dr. Lynch served the American Library Association as its president in 1985/86.  Her ALA service has included Chair of the ALA Committee on Accreditation, Chair of the International Relations Committee, the Budget and Finance Committee, the International Relations Round Table, and the committee which revised the Standards for Ethical Conduct for Rare Book and Manuscripts Libraries, published in 1993.  She chaired the Joint Committee of the American Library Association, the Society of American Archivists, and the American Association of Museums in 2006-7, and was appointed to chair again the International Relations Committee for 2008-9.  She is a member of the Rare book School Board of Directors, and of the Grolier, Caxton and Zamorano Clubs.

In addition to her teaching in the areas of library management, academic libraries and systems of higher education, intellectual freedom, and measurement and evaluation, Dr. Lynch directs the Senior Fellows Program, an executive leadership program for academic librarians who are or will be directing major research libraries.

In 2004 she agreed also to become the founding director of the California Rare Book School.  The School has offered courses during the summers of 2006, 2007, and 2008. It has been supported by nearly $500,000 in external grant support and the support of the special collections librarians and institutions in Southern California.

Professor Lynch is the winner of the American Library Association's 2009 Lippincott award, one of the highest honors in American librarianship. The award will be presented to her at the ALA Annual Banquet in Chicago in July

Oya Rieger

Oya Rieger is Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies at Cornell University Library.  She oversees the Library’s online discovery, digital repository, preservation, electronic publishing, and e-scholarship initiatives.  Her responsibilities also involve the coordination of the Library's large-scale digitization collaborations. She is the coauthor of the award-winning Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives (Research Libraries Group 2000) and has served on several digital imaging and preservation working groups including co-chairing the development of ANSI/NISO Technical Metadata for Digital Images.  Her recent publication in 2008 by CLIR focuses on the digitization challenges presented by large-scale digitization projects. She has a B.S. in Economics, an M.P.A., and an M.S. in Information Systems. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in a joint Cornell program with the Communication, Information Science, and Science & Technology Studies departments. Her research interests focus on sociocultural aspects of the intersection of digital technologies and scholarly communication.  

Sarah E. Thomas

Sarah Thomas is Bodley’s Librarian and Director, Oxford University Library Services.  Before joining the University of Oxford in February 2007, she served as the University Librarian at Cornell University from 1996 until 2007.   In a career spanning thirty-five years, Thomas has cataloged books in Harvard University's Widener Library, taught German at the Johns Hopkins University, managed Library Coordination at the Research Libraries Group in California, served as the Associate Director for Technical Services at the National Agricultural Library, and directed both the Cataloging Directorate and the Public Service Collections Directorate at the Library of Congress.

Thomas earned a Ph.D. in German literature from Johns Hopkins University in 1983, writing her dissertation on the topic of author-publisher relations.  She received her bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1970 and a Master of Science in Library Science from Simmons College in 1973.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar, is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). His most recent book is the edited (with Carolyn de la Pena) collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.COM, Salon.com, openDemocracy.net, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation. After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, and now is an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and a fellow at both the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Ian Willison

Ian Willison is a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, where he is chairman of the seminar on the Sociology of Texts.

From 1953 to 1987 he was on the staff of the British Museum Library/British Library. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Library Association and a member of the Bibliographical Society and the American Antiquarian Society. Mr Willison also teaches on the MA in the History of the Book.

He is currently co-editor of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain and is an advisory editor of Publishing History. He has published widely in the field of the history of the book and the history of the national research library.

In November 2005, Mr Willison was awarded the CBE for his services to the study of the history of the book.