Western Libraries makes two hires

The Western Libraries at Western Washington University has made two hires recently.

In order to meet Western Libraries’ longstanding commitment to teaching and research, Mike Olson was hired this past August into the newly created position of director of Scholarly Resources and Collection Services.

Olson has been a senior-level library administrator for nearly 25 years at Harvard, UCLA, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Clark University and most recently as Dean of Libraries and Professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Olson has collaborated successfully with the U.S. Department of State, embassies and consulates around the world, a former chancellor of Germany, four Nobel Laureates in Literature, and numerous alumni clubs in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. He has written two books and produced more than one hundred articles or conference presentations. To date he has raised over $3 million for libraries. Olson has received awards from the American Library Association, Harvard University, the Librarians Association of the University of California, UCLA, the Goethe-Institut, and the Association of the German Book Trade. Olson is a 2014 UCLA Senior Fellow. Olson’s academic credentials include an M.A. and Ph.D. in Germanic Languages, a Masters in Library and Information Science from UCLA, and a B.A. in Germanics from the University of Washington.

As the Director of Scholarly Resources and Collection Services, Olson will provide leadership for the selection and management of collections, including oversight for the resource access budget, cataloging, acquisitions, ILL, circulation, and scholarly communication. He will coordinate the development and promotion of sustainable models of scholarly communication, and he will work closely with library leadership, staff, and external stakeholders to develop other digital initiatives.

In a second strategic hire to foster research and creative activities, in June 2014, Jenny Oleen was hired as Western Libraries’ first Scholarly Communications Librarian. Oleen is involved with efforts to build and promote an Institutional Repository (Western CEDAR), and she will be working closely with the university community to promote open access publishing by encouraging and supporting faculty, staff, and students to share their research and scholarship in CEDAR.  Oleen comes to Western from K-State Libraries at Kansas State University where she was employed as their Scholarly Communications Librarian.

Oleen