Robert H. McDonald is Dean of University Libraries, Senior Vice Provost of Online and Extended Education, and Professor. He also holds an appointment as a Fellow with the CU Boulder Institute of Cognitive Science.
His expertise and interests include teaching and learning technologies that enable libraries to better support researchers at all levels, open source software development, scholarly communications, and new model publishing. Robert has also been an active proponent of diversity initiatives in libraries throughout his career and is committed to creating library spaces that are welcoming, diverse and inclusive for all of our Library users.
Dean McDonald leads the Boulder campus library system in fulfilling their mission to inspire learning, research and discovery by connecting knowledge, information and people. As Senior Vice Provost of Online and Extended Education, Robert serves in an executive role working with all colleges and schools to develop and launch online credential programs designed to extend the University of Colorado's academic excellence through CU Boulder Online.
Research interests include integration of learning eco-systems, lean and agile frameworks in technology management, data preservation, data cyberinfrastructure and big data analytics.
He is active professionally with a number of national and international organizations and conferences, including service on the Educause Nominations and Leadership Development Committee, the UPCEA Annual Conference Committee, the Association of Research Libraries Board of Directors, the Board of Directors of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, the HathiTrust Board of Governors and as general co-chair for the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2013 and 2017.
Prior to joining the CU Boulder Libraries in 2018, Robert held positions at Indiana University Bloomington, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Florida State University, and Auburn University. He earned his Master of Library & Information Science degree at the University of South Carolina, and holds a Master of Music degree from the University of Georgia.
Libraries know the potential fallibility of metadata created by hand, and as a result, the academic research library has a long history of working with metadata to ensure good storage, maintainability, shareability, and accessibility.
The Kuali Foundation offers a lightweight administrative framework for developing new models for open source application development.
On Monday of this week Indiana University and the University of Illinois announced the creation of the HathiTrust Research Center.
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