Merrilee Proffitt - Biography
Merrilee Proffitt is a Senior Program Officer in OCLC Research. She provides project management skills and expert support to institutions represented within the OCLC Research Library Partnership. Proffitt is an active member of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (RBMS-ACRL), and serves on ACRL's Research Planning and Review Committee. She has also served on the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) Editorial Board, the Text Encoding Initiative Council, and currently serves on the Encoded Archival Description Working Group. Proffitt has authored or co-authored articles, guidelines, and reports for a variety organizations and professional journals. She is frequently invited to speak at international professional conferences and workshops on topics relating to digital libraries and special collections.
Proffitt's current projects and interests include: archival description, increasing access to special collections, the impact of copyright on primary source material, and digital library initiatives. Before joining OCLC in 2001, Proffitt was director of digital archive development at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
While at UC Berkeley, Proffitt helped develop the California Heritage Collection, an online archive of more than 30,000 images illustrating California's history and culture; the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives, which provides documentation of the experience of Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps; and Chinese in California, a collection that illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through nearly 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials.
Links:
Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley
California Heritage Collection
Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives
Chinese in California
July 2012
