About Sandy Payette
For over 25 years, Sandy Payette has operated at the intersections of theory and practice through multiple roles in industry, academia, and not-for-profits. She has held multiple leadership roles in areas of technical and scholarly research, software development, and development of knowledge infrastructures with open source communities, not-for-profits, and research libraries.
In 1994 at the dawn of the Word Wide Web, Sandy was a senior software engineer at Cornell University during the era of the emerging digital library. She was a member of the Cornell Computer Science department’s Digital Library Research Group where she was a researcher, system architect and lead developer for the software known as the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture. She led the evolution of her research into a successful open source project (the Fedora Project) and its sustaining organization (Fedora Commons). Building collaborations with other open source initiatives, she became the founding CEO of DuraSpace, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization. As the CEO of DuraSpace (https://duraspace.org/), Sandy led the organization through its startup years and expanded the portfolio of its open technologies that fit within digital knowledge infrastructure, including Fedora, DSpace, DuraCloud, VIVO, and adjacent services.
It was during her time as CEO of DuraSpace that she developed an academic interest on key questions about the social and cultural impact of technology, especially the design and development of software technologies. From 2011-2016 Sandy pursued a PhD at Cornell University focused in disciplines of Communication and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and completed her degree in 2018. While working on her degree, she served as a research investigator at University of Michigan (2014-2015), and as a leader in practice at Cornell University Library in the roles of Director of Information Technology for Research and Scholarship (2015-2019) and interim Associate University Librarian (2018-2019).
About the Distinguished Seminar Series
OCLC Research established the Distinguished Seminar Series in 1978 to encourage the sharing of thought leadership around topics that effect the ever-evolving world of librarianship and information sharing. We invite distinguished professionals to our headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, to give presentations on topics of current interest. Speakers may discuss recently completed or early-stage research that they have undertaken or report other types of professional activity. Some topics align closely with our current research directions, while others represent areas of interest to the library and information science community that are not formally being studied by our researchers.