Rachael Kotarski joins UChicago as Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategy and Services
Rachael Kotarski will join the Library as Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategy and Services on January 11. In this role, she will provide vision, leadership, and coordination for the digital services of the University of Chicago Library. Reporting to University Librarian and Dean of the University Library Torsten Reimer, she will be a member of the Library's Strategic Leadership Board.
Most recently, Kotarski served as Head of Library Research Services at the University of Bath in England. There, she was responsible for teams and services for open access, research data, repositories, research analytics, and the University archive.
Building on an academic background in biology at the University of Sheffield, Kotaraski started her career working on biomedical data services at Biomed Central, a scientific open access publisher. She subsequently joined the British Library for 15 years in progressively more senior positions, culminating in the position of Head of Research Infrastructure Services. In that role she was responsible for the British Library’s repository services and institutional repository; its discovery services, including the world’s largest library catalog search; its activities and services around open access, scholarly communications, and persistent identifiers; research data services including the national DataCite consortium; and digital collections and innovation projects with researchers and research organizations internationally.
"Kotarski’s achievements stood out during a competitive application process," Dean Reimer said. She has written the British Library’s first research data strategy. She grew the UK’s national DataCite consortium from four to a hundred member organizations, enabling management of and access to a large section of the UK’s research data. She co-led the successful development of a persistent identifier policy for the EU’s flagship infrastructure service, the European Open Science Cloud, and took a lead role in three EU-funded multidisciplinary projects to create a global infrastructure for a web of persistent identifiers. Kotarski managed the development and operations of the British Library’s open source, multi-tenant, interdisciplinary repository service, providing repository services to partners such as the British Museum, National Museums of Scotland, and the National Health Service. A member of the Chinese-British community, she played a key role in enabling the British Library’s ambition to be an anti-racist organization by facilitating the data and insight services underpinning the cross-organizational anti-racism program. She also developed the business case for making the British Library’s discovery system compliant with accessibility requirements through a modern user interface.
An active participant in community initiatives and projects, Kotarski has served as co-chair of the UK’s national Research Identifiers Coordinating Committee; co-chair of the European Open Science Cloud FAIR Working Group (to make research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable); and principal investigator or co-investigator of several cross-institutional projects to build national infrastructure for persistent identifiers, the discovery, access, analysis, and preservation of practice research assets, and to develop a network of trusted Arts and Humanities data repositories.
"Rachael’s international leadership experience will be crucial for developing data strategy and services, alongside a wide range of other priorities in the digital space," Reimer said.
