NANCY E. GWINN

Nancy E. Gwinn is Director, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, a 22-branch system with facilities in Washington, D.C., Edgewater, Md., New York City, and the Republic of Panama. She joined the Smithsonian in 1984 as Assistant Director, Collections Management, a position she held until being appointed director in 1997. Prior to the Smithsonian, she served as Associate Director, Program Coordination, in the Research Libraries Group, Stanford, California, and Program Officer, Council on Library Resources, Washington, D.C. She began her career as a Special Recruit at the Library of Congress and served in the Congressional Research Service for six years.

Dr. Gwinn has extensive experience in the field of preservation as a manager, consultant, and author. At the Research Libraries Group, she was responsible for the RLG Preservation Program, through which a model for cooperative preservation microfilming was developed and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She led the development of methods for sharing information about preservation microfilming as part of bibliographic records and published a manual of standards and best practices for RLG members which was widely used in the profession. Her consultant report for the U.S. Agricultural Information Network (USAIN) served as the basis for funding a nationwide program among land-grant institutions to preserve the literature of agriculture. Among her publications is Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists, which was published by the American Library Association (ALA) and awarded the Waldo Gifford Leland Prize of the Society of American Archivists in 1988. She is a past chair of the ALA/ALCTS Preservation Microfilming Committee and is currently the ALA representative to the IFLA Standing Committee on Preservation and chair of the Association of Research Libraries Committee on Preservation of Research Library Materials. A graduate of the University of Wyoming (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (AMLS), Dr. Gwinn received a Ph.D. in American Civilization from George Washington University in 1996.