The Board of Directors is comprised of twelve volunteer members (nine elected, and three appointed), drawn from the CRKN membership. Details on Board composition, powers and operation may be found in the CRKN By-laws.
Member
Dr. Annette Trimbee became President and Vice-Chancellor at MacEwan University on August 1, 2020. She was previously President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Winnipeg.
Dr. Trimbee's key accomplishments at the University of Winnipeg included completing a university-wide strategic directions plan, enacting a three-year budget strategy, and implementing an Indigenous Course Requirement for all undergraduate students — among the first in Canada.
Previously, Dr. Trimbee served as Deputy Minister of several departments in the Alberta government, including Finance and Treasury Board, and Advanced Education and Technology. Key accomplishments include Alberta Budget 2012 and 2013, the redesign of Alberta’s innovation system, creation of the Alberta Innovates Corporations, bringing Alberta post-secondary institutions together to plan and collaborate through Campus Alberta, and development of Alberta’s Health Policy Framework and Integrated Resource Management Policy Framework.
Dr. Trimbee currently serves on the boards of Universities Canada, the voice of Canadian universities at home and abroad; and USports, which oversees sports at 56 Canadian universities. She is also a member of the Public Interest Law Centre Advisory Committee, which informs the centre’s case selections and its case portfolio of human rights, environmental, consumer, and Indigenous law.
She holds a BSc from The University of Winnipeg, an MSc from the University of Manitoba, and a PhD from McMaster University in aquatic ecology. She was also a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alberta.
Gwen Bird has been Dean of Libraries at Simon Fraser University since October 2014. Previously, she served as Executive Director of the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) from 2011 – 2014, coordinating collaboration between western Canadian university libraries. During this time she was active in the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC), and the international shared print archiving community.
Prior to her appointment at COPPUL she was Associate University Librarian, Collections and Scholarly Communication at SFU, with overall responsibility for collections management, the acquisitions budget, and licensing of electronic resources. From 2003 – 2008 she was a member of the Content Strategy Committee at CRKN (then the NRT). Gwen's research and professional interests include shared print archiving, library collaboration, and collections management.
A Toronto native, Bird earned an honours BA in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. in 1986, followed by a Master of Library Science at the University of British Columbia in 1992.
Larry P. Alford is Chief Librarian at the University of Toronto, the largest research library in Canada and the third-ranked in North America. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the University of Toronto Press. Prior to joining the University of Toronto he was Dean of University Libraries at Temple University, including responsibilities for the Temple University Press, which publishes approximately 60 scholarly monographs per year. He has also held a variety of positions in the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over a 30 year period, including serving as Deputy University Librarian and Interim University Librarian.
Mr. Alford served as a trustee of OCLC, Inc. from 2002 – 14, and as its chair form 2007 – 2012. Mr. Alford is an active member of the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Canadiana.org, and a former director of the Abraham Lincoln Foundation in Philadelphia, PA. Mr. Alford holds a B.A. and M.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UNC School of Information and Library Science in May 2005.
Lesley Balcom became Dean of Libraries at the University of New Brunswick on July 1, 2015, after serving a year as Interim Director of Libraries. Previously, she was the Associate Director of UNB Libraries for Learning & Research Services, and the Head of Reference. In these roles Lesley has led projects including the development of UNB’s copyright service, the re-visioning of UNB’s Electronic Text Centre as the Centre for Digital Scholarship, and the creation of the Learning Commons at Harriet Irving Library.
Within UNB she is a member of University Budget Management Committee, the Research Strategic Planning Committee, and the Senate Academic Planning Committee, amongst other commitments. She holds degrees from Mount Allison University (Honours in Canadian Studies) and a Masters degree in Library & Information Science from the University of Western Ontario.
Guylaine Beaudry is Vice-Provost, Digital Strategy and University Librarian at Concordia University (Montreal). She led the major renovation of the Webster Library and the transformation of the chapel of the Grey Nuns motherhouse into a reading room. Since August 2017, she has been leading the university-wide digital strategy. She was previously Executive Director of Érudit (www.erudit.org), a publishing platform for humanities and social sciences scholarly books and journals. She wrote many publications on scholarly publishing, notably, the books La communication scientifique et le numérique, (Hermès/Lavoisier, Paris), Le nouveau monde numérique et les revues scientifiques (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal (PUM) and La Découverte, Paris, France), that was translated and published by University of Calgary Press (Scholarly Journals in the New Digital World) and Profession : bibliothécaire (PUM).
She was recently elected member of the Royal Society of Canada and served in 2014 on its Expert Panel on the status and future of libraries and archives in Canada. She holds a doctorate in history of the book from École pratique des hautes études (Paris). Her thesis is entitled “Scholarly communications and the digital revolution: Analysis of a mutation period from a historical perspective”.
Bernard Bizimana holds an MSc in computer science and an MSc in library and information science. He first came to HEC Montréal in May 2005, and has been the director of the Library since May 2016. He is responsible for advancing the organizational vision and the strategic orientation of the Library and for aligning them with the teaching and the research goals of the School. During the last two years, his most important challenge has been to develop and implement a new business model for the Library. HEC Montréal is a Canadian business school that offers a comprehensive set of study programs, including a BBA, many MSc specializations, an MBA, an EMBA, and a PhD. With approximately 9,000 full-time students and 300 faculty members, HEC Montréal is one of the largest business schools in the world.
Vickery Bowles is the City Librarian at Toronto Public Library (TPL), a library system serving 2.8 million residents through its 100 branches and online network. She believes passionately in the difference public libraries make in the lives of individuals, in communities and cities. Vickery is currently working on the development of TPL’s new strategic plan with a focus on new service models, digital literacy and inclusion, workforce development and innovation.
Vickery is Chair of the Urban Libraries Council, headquartered in Washington DC, and a member of the Canadian Urban Libraries Council, the Ontario Library Association, and the Toronto Region Board of Trade Smart Cities Working Group.
Concordia’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Denis Cossette has more 20 years of experience working in the higher education sector. He began his five-year term on August 1, 2016.
Prior to joining Concordia, Cossette served as associate vice-president of Financial Resources at the University of Ottawa. He also held the role of director of the university’s Financial Services from 2005 to 2010 and served as interim VP of Resources for a one-year period.
From 1990 to 2005, he was the director of Financial Resources and vice-president of Administration and Finance for La Cité, a French-language college of applied arts and technology that has its principal campus in Ottawa.
A graduate of Université Laval (licence in accounting science, bachelor of business administration) and the Université du Québec en Outaouais (certificate in administrative data processing), Cossette is also a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario and of the l’Ordre des comptables professionnels agréés du Québec.
I am a Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities with research interests in linked data, data modelling, code as a representational medium, queer history, and Victorian popular culture. I co-direct the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project with Michelle Schwartz (Ryerson University). I am the vice-president (English) of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques and an associate director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (University of Victoria).
Rebecca Graham began her tenure as Chief Information Officer/Chief Librarian at the University of Guelph in May 2012. In 2017, she was reappointed as University Librarian. Prior to joining Guelph, she spent eight years working in the libraries of Harvard University. She began her Harvard tenure in 2003 as Associate Director for Library Operations at the Countway Library of Medicine and moved to the Harvard College Library (HCL) in 2006 where she served as the Associate Librarian for Preservation, Digitization and Administrative Services.
Prior to Harvard, Rebecca’s academic library experience includes responsibilities for library IT and the digital library program at Johns Hopkins University. She served as the IDirector and Program Associate for the Digital Library Federation (DLF) in Washington DC. She served as Manager, Integrated Library Systems at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign (UIUC).
Melissa is responsible for the strategic direction and general operations of the University Library, ensuring its continued contribution to the university’s goals, mission, vision, and values. She leads a team of 150 faculty and staff in seven libraries, University Archives & Special Collections, and Student Learning Services.
Melissa joined the Library as Dean on February 1, 2017. She previously served as associate vice-president for information services, and director of New Brunswick Libraries, at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J, and held a variety of leadership roles in academic health sciences libraries in California. She earned an EdD from the University of Southern California, a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Texas, and a BA in psychobiology from the University of California, Riverside.
She represents the University of Saskatchewan as a member of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), and the Council of Prairie and Pacific Libraries (COPPUL).
Catherine Steeves is the Vice-Provost and Chief Librarian at Western University and as such participates as Library Director in the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL). She is a member of the CARL Advancing Research Committee and the OCUL Collaborative Futures Task Force. She is a Western MLIS graduate who returned to Western in August 2014 following her position as Deputy Chief Information Officer and Associate Chief Librarian at the University of Guelph. Previously, she worked as the ITS Operations Manager for the University of Alberta Libraries.
A past president of the Ontario Library Information Technology Association, she has also served on the boards of the Canadian Library Association, the Canadian Association of College and University Libraries and the Ontario Library Association. Catherine's scholarly interests include organizational change, information technology, leadership, and the evolution of research libraries.