Joan Starr to retire in June

Joan Starr, EZID Service Manager, in CDL’s Infrastructure and Applications Support group, will be retiring on June 28, 2018. While this is sad news for CDL and the UC community, it is the right time for Joan  (first grandchild on way) and we were lucky to have her for as long as we did.

Joan’s first experience with CDL was as an intern while she was still in library school in 2003. She fell in love with the CDL mission and within 18 months was offered a position as the Project Planning and Resource Allocation Service Manager. This role allowed her to work with many different teams on a variety of projects, including Mass Digitization, HathiTrust, a CDL website redesign, JHOVE2, and others. She led two University of California (UC) Library system-wide project management initiatives and was the project manager for two large-scale UC technical services improvement efforts.  During this period, she also served as CDL’s Internship Coordinator, improving the recruitment process and matching eager graduate students with CDL projects and programs.

In 2009, the DataCite organization emerged, with CDL as one of its founding members. Shortly thereafter, CDL formed a new team formed to build an identifier service, and Joan became the service/product manager (and chief evangelist), thereof. Through her efforts, and over the following years, EZID grew into an internationally recognizable brand with over 180 clients on 4 continents, including representatives from academia, government, the nonprofit, and commercial sectors. Joan became actively engaged in DataCite’s metadata working group as well as Force11, participating in the development of the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, and follow-on work to promote implementation of the principles.

Last August, the EZID program began the transition of its DOI services to DataCite.  Since then Joan has been instrumental in supporting EZID clients through this transition, providing guides, webinars, and personal introductions and support. As one client wrote, “We really appreciate all the work you’ve done to get us to the point where DataCite transition is straightforward and easy!  You’ve been right there with us every step of the way!” CDL will soon provide a new contact for EZID-related activities going forward.

As you can see from the above, Joan has been a key member of the organization for many years. Her persistence and professionalism have been a hallmark of her tenure and will be missed by all. We wish Joan the very best with her next adventure.