University Libraries Dean Tyler Walters believes in building the information infrastructure and services needed for research in the 21st century. Throughout his professional career, he has served on working groups, organization boards, and committees dedicated to promoting and creating open technologies, and making research, data, and scholarly activities available to the public.

His latest endeavor, leading the merger of international nonprofits DuraSpace and LYRASIS, continues his professional influence in the areas of open data, open source software, and open scholarship to benefit future advances in the sciences and humanities.

While serving as board president of DuraSpace, an organization supporting open source software communities, Walters and others saw an opportunity to connect with LYRASIS, a leading membership organization of more than 1,000 libraries, museums, and archives that supports shared access to academic, scientific, and cultural heritage.

“Libraries across the nation and beyond create nonprofits,” said Walters. “Collaboration in consortia saves libraries money in technology infrastructures and applications that we need to do our work. This is an important collaboration to the functioning of a library.” 

“These two organizations had similar goals with overlapping membership,” said Walters. “It made sense that this merger could make their common mission stronger and enhance services, technology, and expertise to better support libraries and other types of cultural and educational institutions.”

This merger will create a new model for collaboration, innovation, and development in the landscape of academic, research, and public libraries, galleries, archives, and museums. It will strengthen each organization’s expertise and offer opportunities for expansion.

“Academic libraries rely on DuraSpace’s open source software projects DSpace, Fedora, and VIVO and LYRASIS ArchivesSpace and CollectionSpace,” said Walters. “Merging all of these technologies together under LYRASIS will better serve us all into the future.” 

Walters will continue to provide leadership to the new LYRASIS by serving a three-year term on its Board of Trustees. 

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