Lisa Carter Named ARL Visiting Program Officer

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has appointed Lisa Carter—the Head of our Special Collections Research Center—as Visiting Program Officer to work with their ARL Special Collections Working Group.

The ARL is a non-profit organization of 123 leading research libraries in the US and Canada with the mission to clarify and provide guidance for issues that advance great research institutions in North America.

A key ARL objective is to promote collaborative integration and enduring access to comprehensive research collections and resources in all formats that can be used to advance research, teaching, and learning. The Special Collections Working Group helps accomplish this by addressing issues with collecting, surfacing, and leveraging special collections, the area of libraries that includes rare books, archives, and manuscripts.

Carter's primary responsibility for the ARL assignment is to collaborate with the chair of the Working Group, Alice Prochaska, University Librarian at Yale, to develop agendas, to facilitate the sharing of ideas that will advance the ARL objective, and to assist with planning and preparation for a conference in late 2009.

Under Carter’s leadership, the NCSU Libraries are developing strengths in the history of textiles, industry, science and technology, as well as scientific innovation and entrepreneurship in North Carolina. Carter’s appointment is an acknowledgement of respect the NCSU Libraries have earned and the value that her peers place in the work she has done in Special Collections.

Previous to her appointment at NCSU in 2007, Carter was Director of Archives at the University of Kentucky Libraries' Special Collections and Digital Programs. She focused on digital and audio-visual archive projects, and received a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) Archival Research Fellowship to investigate digital video preservation issues in conjunction with her work in archiving and digitizing Kentucky Educational Television's broadcast programs. She was an ARL Research Library Leadership Fellow in 2007-09 and is an active member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, the Midwest Archives Conference, and the Society of American Archivists.