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.
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 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: supporting the work of unique and distinctive collections, how to developing better relationships between Wikimedia projects and cultural heritage institutions, and developing more inclusive descriptive practices.
Before coming to OCLC in 2001, Merrilee was Director of Digital Archive Development at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Publications
Archives and Special Collections Linked Data: Navigating between Notes and Nodes
21 July 2020
OCLC Research Archives and Special Collections Linked Data Review Group
This publication shares the findings from the Archives and Special Collections Linked Data Review Group, which explored key areas of concern and opportunities for archives and special collections in transitioning to a linked data environment.
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.