Merrilee Proffitt
Senior Manager
Merrilee works in OCLC Research and provides project management skills and expert support to institutions within the OCLC Research Library Partnership.
Merrilee has authored or co-authored articles, guidelines, and reports for a variety organizations and professional journals. She is frequently an invited speaker at international professional conferences and workshops on topics relating to Wikimedia project, digital libraries and special collections, and DEI in libraries. In 2014, Merrilee was elected as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, the highest honor bestowed on individuals by SAA and awarded for outstanding contributions to the archival profession.
She is the editor of Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge (ALA Editions, 2018) as well as a co-author of Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Community-informed Agenda for Reparative and Inclusive Descriptive Practice (OCLC Research, 2022). Her current projects and interests include: supporting the work of unique and distinctive collections, and developing more inclusive library practices.
Before coming to OCLC in 2001 Merrilee was Director of Digital Archive Development at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Hanging Together
Merrilee is a frequent contributor to the OCLC Research blog, Hanging Together
OCLC Publications
Summary of Research: Findings from the Building a National Archival Finding Aid Network Project
31 May 2023
Chela Scott Weber, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Brooke Doyle, Lesley A. Langa, Merrilee Proffitt, Bruce Washburn, Itza A. Carbajal
Synthesizes OCLC’s findings for the Building a National Finding Aid Network project. The research investigated end user and contributor needs for finding aid aggregations and evaluated EAD encoded finding aid data quality and consistency from existing regional archival aggregators.
EAD Analysis: Findings from the Building a National Archival Finding Aid Network Project
30 May 2023
Bruce Washburn, Merrilee Proffitt, Chela Scott Weber
Analyzes a corpus of EAD encoded collection descriptions provided by regional finding aid aggregators in the US to assess existing EAD data as raw material for building a national finding aid aggregation.
Focus Group Interviews: Findings from the Building a National Archival Finding Aid Network Project
30 May 2023
Chela Scott Weber, Merrilee Proffitt, Lesley A. Langa, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Brittany Brannon, Brooke Doyle
Investigates the needs of archivists and others who might contribute to a national archival aggregator through focus group interviews with archivists and archives administrators from across the United States.