The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has appointed Lizanne Payne to serve as Print Archives Program Manager, effective November 9, 2009. Ms. Payne will lead CRL’s cooperative print archiving initiative. The goal of the initiative is to significantly reduce costs, increase accessibility, and foster long-term preservation of journals, newspapers, and government documents for scholars and researchers in the CRL community.

Ms. Payne has extensive experience in library cooperation and development of collaborative programs. As Executive Director of the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) since 1991, she has presided over the implementation and ongoing development of WRLC’s shared digital library systems, as well as the construction and operation of WRLC’s shared library storage facility.

Ms. Payne has spoken and written actively in the field of print repositories and shared print programs, including:

• the keynote address at the first ALA preconference on library offsite storage in 1999
• an invited presentation to the 2nd international IFLA conference on Repository Libraries in Finland in 2004
• a commissioned paper on “Library Storage Facilities and the Future of Print Collections in North America” for OCLC, Inc. in 2007
• and a lecture series on “The Future of Library Collections” in Australia in 2008.

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. CRL supports advanced research and teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences by ensuring the survival and availability of the knowledge resources vital to these disciplines. CRL accomplishes this mission through cooperative action with its members and partners.

Since its founding, CRL has played a leading role in promoting collaborative solutions to the challenges of preserving the written record. In recent years, CRL’s print preservation initiatives have included:

• the 2003 “Preserving America’s Print Resources” conference, where an invited group of international participants reached consensus on the ideal characteristics of a North American preservation network
• the Distributed Print Archive project, which modeled and tested a framework for the distributed, long-term retention of artifact collections, using JSTOR journals as a test bed
• and the JSTOR archive project, which is building an accessible archive of the print copies of journals available through JSTOR at CRL.