Kate McCready, she/her/hers BTAA VPO for Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing
- mccre008@umn.edu
- Phone
- 612-626-4357
- ORCID iD
-
0000-0002-2064-9187
- Experts
- Experts@UMN
- Full position title(s)
- Visiting Program Officer to the Big Ten Academic Alliance for Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing
- Libraries department
- Libraries Administration
About
Kate McCready is serving in a three-year appointment as the Visiting Program Officer to the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Initiatives to advance the work of building the 'BIG Collection'. In this role, Kate will be leading the development, from June 2022 through May 2025, of a vision for a multifaceted, sustainable course of action to strengthen academy-owned publishing for the BTAA. Kate provides leadership in strategy development for the acquisition, publishing, and archiving of open access scholarly content, with a specific emphasis on investigating direction and strategy for developing shared publishing infrastructure and services at scale.
Formerly, from 2019 to 2022, Kate served on the Libraries senior leadership team as the Interim Associate University Librarian for Collections & Content Strategy where she was responsible for the goals and work of the C&CS service area and provided leadership in the development, discovery, and long term stewardship of the University of Minnesota Libraries’ wide-ranging collections which include over 7.7 million print volumes, and millions of electronic resources that address all current and emerging areas of study at the University. Before that, Kate was the Director of the Content Services department which comprised the Interlibrary Loan/Digital Delivery and the Open Scholarship and Publishing Services [OSPS] units. Kate has expertise in library management, acquisitions, borrowing, licensing, description, and discovery of content. She also has expertise in the leadership and oversight of the library enterprise systems, digitization services, as well as the management and preservation of the Libraries’ physical collections. Kate's leadership also extended to oversight of the Libraries work to provide services to campus content creators on intellectual property rights and copyright information. Kate has worked extensively to advocate for sustainable models for scholarly communication and information sharing. She has managed copyright permissions services, and publishing services where she collaboratively developed a new program to provide services and infrastructure that support the creation, production, and dissemination of UMN faculty and instructor produced digital scholarship.
Kate has extensive project management skills and served as the program director of Experts@Minnesota which creates profiles for University of Minnesota faculty and researchers to allow for research networking and the discovery of our institution's expertise. Kate also served as the project manager for EthicShare, a research environment created for the field of bioethics by the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics, University Libraries, and Department of Computer Science. It now resides at Johns Hopkins University. Earlier in her career, Kate provided and led a variety of reference and information services, taught research methodology classes, ran a Foundation Center Cooperating Collection, served as the editor of Foundations in Wisconsin, and coordinated several grant projects. She is a librarian, with an MLIS from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.