Ann Okerson has been Associate University Librarian at Yale since September 1995.  Initially, she held the portfolio for Collections Development and Management; in 1999, this was expanded and she served as AUL for Collections and Technical Services; since 2003, she has special responsibility for Collections and International Programs, as Yale makes important strides to become a more truly global university.

She has spent her entire career in and around librarianship.  After a decade and a half of academic library and library management experience, particularly in serials and collections development and several years in the commercial sector, she served for half a decade as a senior program officer for the Association of Research Libraries as its Director, Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing.  At ARL, she was active nationally in working with librarians, academics, and vendors to identify and address the most urgent issues raised for librarianship by the emergence of networked information technology in the 1990s.  The series of symposia she organized at ARL in the early 1990s was particularly effective at bringing diverse communities of interest together, often for the first time, to grapple cooperatively with the challenges of the new.

At Yale, her challenges include making digital collections available to the many users of this major educational and research institution. This has led her to become an expert, recognized and consulted nationally and internationally, on all the practicalities of licensing digital information for academic use and on building consortia of libraries to achieve the most effective service at the best price for academic users.  Since early 1996, she has been leading a group of large academic research libraries in negotiating licenses for electronic information and organizing them for that purpose into NERL, the NorthEast Research Libraries consortium, and working with them in the wider International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC).  With the 1999 broadening of her portfolio, she has taken on new challenges in process redesign in technical services, as well as taking ultimate responsibility for acquisitions, cataloguing, and preservation services at Yale.

Ms. Okerson has worked over the years on numerous projects, publications, advisory boards, and speaking engagements.  In 1992, she wrote the widely-read synopsis chapter the Andrew W. Mellon study University Libraries and Scholarly Communication (11/92); at ARL, she created and published five editions of the standard Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists (1991-1995).  She also organized and led four electronic networked publishing symposia (organized on behalf of the ARL and the Association of American University Presses), and she edited three volumes of proceedings from those symposia. With James O'Donnell of the University of Pennsylvania, she edited Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads:  a Subversive Proposal for Electronic Journal Publishing (ARL, June 1995), representing an extensive multi-national Internet discussion across many e-lists about the future of scholarly journals.

Her articles on serials pricing (1987) and on copyright (1992) have won American Library Association awards for Best Article in the area of serials, acquisitions, and/or collections in both 1988 and 1993. The ALA named her Serials Librarian of the year in 1993. In 1999 she was named the winner of ALA's LITA/High Tech award.

Since January 1993, Ms. Okerson has been co-owner and co-moderator of NewJour, the Internet list that announces new e-journal, magazine, and newsletter startups to the world. NewJour has over 4000 subscribers on all seven continents. Its World Wide Web site at UC-San Diego is fully searchable and linked to the actual e-journals described in the announcements. The WWW site garners hundreds to thousands of searches daily.

In the fall semester 1995, she served as an Adjunct Faculty member at the Graduate School of Information at the University of Michigan, teaching the course ILS 604: Copyright for the Information Professional.

In 1997, with funding from the Council on Library Resources/Commission on Preservation and Access, she and the Yale Library staff mounted an online educational resource about library licensing of electronic content in a project called Liblicense. Its extensive annotations and links are complemented by Liblicense-l, a moderated online discussion list frequented over 2000 librarians, publishers, and attorneys. The second  phase of the Liblicense project created a freely downloadable licensing software that enables librarians, publishers, and vendors to create customized electronic resource licenses from standard template language.

She has also been profiled in an advertisement in Business Week.

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