Former Director, Scholarly Communication Institute

Along with Deanna Marcum (Associate Librarian, Library of Congress), Richard co-founded the Scholarly Communication Institute in 2003. The creation of the Institute was a natural progression of his twenty years of innovative work in scholarly communication.

In the 1980’s, as Founding Director of the Laboratory for Applied Research in Academic Information at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI), Richard collaborated closely with Victor A. McKusick, one of the key figures in the development of human gene mapping, the National Library of Medicine, and the Johns Hopkins University Press, in the creation of the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, an online reference work updated daily. With funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he led the development of its companion, the Genome Data Base, in support of the international Human Gene Mapping Workshops, and directed international access for both resources. In collaboration with JHMI faculty, the National Library of Medicine, and the Williams & Wilkins Press, he led the development of the Principles of Ambulatory Medicine (PAM), an online resource for clinical care. This resource provided tools for its three editors and eighty-plus authors, distributed throughout the world, to update PAM on a regular basis. During this period, the Council on Library Resources, recognizing the potential importance of this work to the future of libraries, provided funding for the development of the ‘knowledge management model’ and its dissemination to other academic institutions across the country. In many ways, this work was a precursor to SCI.

In the 1990’s, Richard assumed the role of University Librarian and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Information at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). At UCSF, he founded the Center for Knowledge Management, a division of the library that focused on advancing scholarly communication in the digital environment. His first successful project at UCSF was the Red Sage Project (RSP). RSP was a unique collaboration of 20 major medical publishers (commercial and non-profit) and AT&T. They achieved success in developing the first critical mass of online medical journals available to all faculty at UCSF, proving the feasibility and desirability of online journals.

Under his leadership, the UCSF Library collaborated with Professor Stan Glantz in the creation of the Tobacco Control Archive, the largest single archival resource in this area. This resource was enormously helpful to the state attorneys general in their landmark suits against the tobacco companies.

In the late 1990’s, Richard moved to the University of California Office of the President as the Founding University Librarian of the California Digital Library, with its many innovations including the eScholarship program.

In early 2004, Richard decided to pursue many life interests in music, the environment, and marine ecology, which had been put aside through the years. He continued his commitment to advancing digital scholarship as director of the Scholarly Communication Institute, working with and advising Institute participants until April of 2009. Under Richard’s leadership, several important projects emerged from SCI, including EthicShare, the Architecture Visual Resource Network, and the Online Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.