Kristen Wilson wins HARRASSOWITZ Award

The NCSU Libraries Associate Head of Acquisitions and Discovery for Serials Kristen Wilson has won the 2017 HARRASSOWITZ Award for Leadership in Library Acquisitions.

Given annually by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), the award recognizes the contributions by and outstanding leadership of an individual to the field of acquisitions librarianship.

Donated by the HARRASSOWITZ company and named in honor of Dr. Knut Dorn, the award comes with $1,500 and a citation to recognize the winner’s achievement. Wilson will be presented the award at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in June.

Since Wilson came to the NCSU Libraries as a Libraries Fellow in 2007, she’s been an innovator in the acquisitions field, focusing on electronic resources management, knowledge bases, and workflow analysis. She has been a contributor to the development of E-Matrix, an electronic resources management system developed locally at NCSU Libraries.

Wilson has also been active in the use and development of e-resources knowledge bases, particularly through her involvement with the Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) project. She served as the first GOKb editor, helping to develop prototype workflows for data collection and maintenance within an open data framework. She later became principal investigator for the project, guiding industry-wide discussions about the role of open data in the e-resources supply chain.

"I've really enjoyed the opportunities I've had to engage with the library community through projects like GOKb and all the writing I've done,” Wilson said of the award. “It's an honor to know that my efforts have had a positive effect on the acquisitions field."

“Kristen has achieved milestones and made a series of progressively important contributions to the profession, a record and impact that one would normally see in only a more senior librarian, and even at that level only rarely,” Kristin Antelman, the University Librarian at Caltech and former Associate Director for the Digital Library at the NCSU Libraries, wrote in a recommendation letter for the award. “She is an internationally recognized leader in the field of acquisitions and e-resource management.”

NCSU Libraries Head of Acquisitions and Discovery Maria Collins wrote: “The GOKb project was one of the first initiatives to introduce the concept of open, collaborative data management for knowledgebases, as well as the idea of improving upstream the data entering the KB ecosystem to promote consistency of this kind of data across the community. Kristen has served as an effective ambassador for these ideas, and her leadership has pushed this conversation forward.”