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 is an active member of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (RBMS-ACRL). She has also served on the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) Editorial Board, the Text Encoding Initiative Council and on the Encoded Archival Description Working Group. 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 digital libraries and special collections.
In 2014, Merrilee was elected as a Fellow of SAA, the highest honor bestowed on individuals by SAA and awarded for outstanding contributions to the archival profession. She is passionate about forging connections between Wikimedia projects and cultural heritage institutions. She is the editor of Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge (ALA Editions, 2018).
Her current projects and interests include: archival description, increasing access to special collections, the impact of copyright on primary source material, digital library initiatives, looking at developing better relationships between Wikipedia and cultural heritage institutions, and how online instruction and degree programs may impact libraries.
Before coming to OCLC in 2001, Merrilee was Director of Digital Archive Development at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Publications
WikiCite 2018-2019: Citations for the sum of all human knowledge
17 July 2019
Phoebe Ayers, Daniel Mietchen, Jake Orlowitz, Merrilee Proffitt, Sarah Rodlund, Elizabeth Seiver, Dario Taraborelli, Ben Vershbow
WikiCite is an initiative uniting the Wikidata, linked data, and library communities to create an open repository of bibliographic data. This WikiCite 2018 conference overview examines the future of open bibliographic data and the impact that WikiCite achieved over the past year.
ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations
18 April 2019
ARL Task Force on Wikimedia and Linked Open Data
This Association of Research Libraries white paper informs librarians about GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) activity in Wikidata to suggest strategies for research library use, particularly in community-based collections, community-owned infrastructure, and collective collections.
Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge
26 April 2018
Merrilee Proffitt
This book encourages collaboration among academia, archives, libraries, and the volunteer Wikipedia community to connect communities of knowledge. It shows how libraries can partner with Wikipedia to improve content quality and make library services and collections more visible on the open web.