New OCLC EMEA delegates elected to OCLC Members Council

DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 24 June 2008  – At the May 2008 OCLC Members Council, two new delegates were appointed for the OCLC Europe, Middle East & Africa region. The appointment followed a nomination round and an election among the members, according to OCLC Members Council rules. These changes take effect beginning with the Members Council meeting. The Members Council provides advice and counsel to OCLC.

OCLC Members Council delegates serve for a three year period. This year, Ellen Tise (Stellenbosch University, South Africa) ends her term. “OCLC is very grateful to Ellen Tise for her time and efforts contributed to this important OCLC body,” says Rein van Charldorp, Managing Director, OCLC EMEA.

Gwenda Thomas is elected to a 3-year term. Gwenda Thomas is the Director of Library Services at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, a library that is recognised for its leadership in the area of institutional repository implementation as well as participation in a number of national projects to digitise collection content.

Prior to her current position, Gwenda Thomas held senior management positions in FOTIM (a higher education and library consortium), in the national library association LIASA and in the Department of Library Services at the University of South Africa. Throughout her career Ms. Thomas has been an active member in the South African library profession and national associations.

Elected as a new alternate delegate for the same period, 2008-2011, is Raymond Bérard, Director of ABES, the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education in France. "OCLC would like to congratulate all new delegates," says Mr. van Charldorp.

There are 66 Members Council delegates who are elected by and represent OCLC member libraries in their respective regions. Council meets three times a year. These meetings, which are attended by OCLC management and members of the OCLC Board of Trustees, serve as a forum for exchanging ideas and raising issues.

The OCLC EMEA delegates come from various areas in the library community: Poul Erlandsen (Delegate at Large OCLC Members Council Executive Committee, National Library of Education, Denmark), Bernd Dugall (Frankfurt University Library, Germany), Ariëtte Skolnik (City Library of Haarlem, Netherlands), David Bradbury (City of London Guildhall Library, UK), Juka Hakala (Helsinki University Library, Finland), Dr. Klaus Ceynowa (Bavarian State Library, Germany) and Graham Jefcoate (Radboud University Library, Netherlands). Robin Green (University of Warwick, UK) and John Tsebe (National Library of South Africa) are alternate delegates.

The number of delegates from each region is based on that region's proportional contribution to the WorldCat bibliographic database and number of OCLC-member institutions. Delegates report back to OCLC members and participants through regional service providers and other state and regional associations. For more information, see OCLC Members Council.

About OCLC

Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC is a nonprofit library service and research organisation that has provided computer-based cataloguing, reference, resource sharing, eContent, preservation, library management and Web services to 60,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories. OCLC and its member libraries worldwide have created and maintain WorldCat, the world's richest online resource for finding library materials. WorldCat.org is a Web destination with search and social networking features that allow information seekers to discover, localise and personalise content from a library's collections and those of more than 10,000 WorldCat libraries globally. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.

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