Farewell to Patti Martin
With fond appreciation, CDL is today announcing the retirement of one of its leading and longest-running program directors: Patricia “Patti” Martin, Director of CDL’s Discovery and Delivery (D2D) Program, who will be retiring from CDL effective June 30th, 2017. Kurt Ewoldsen, CDL’s Manager for Applications and Infrastructure Support, will add Interim Director of D2D to his current portfolio of duties upon Patti’s departure.
Patti joined CDL in January 2005 as Bibliographic Services Manager after a previous career as a program manager at Microsoft Corporation, and was promoted to Director of Discovery and Delivery Services in 2006. As D2D director, Patti has overseen a wide range of bibliographic and discovery services on behalf of the UC Libraries, including the Melvyl union catalog, interlibrary loan and document delivery services, and the UC-eLinks link resolver, as well as collections analysis systems and services that support shared print activities on behalf of UC and the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), a regional shared print initiative of which CDL is the administrative host, and Zephir, the HathiTrust metadata management system.
Early evidence of Patti’s impact on UC was her service on the Bibliographic Services Task Force, a systemwide committee convened to rethink UC’s approach to discovery and service delivery. Patti was appointed Chair of that group following the retirement of its original chair, Terry Ryan of UCLA. The BSTF Report, as it was fondly known, had a major influence on the national conversation about unified bibliographic discovery; its executive summary, with such memorable mantras as “Deliver bibliographic services where the users are” and “Support searching across the entire bibliographic information space,” is as relevant today as it was in 2006 (Google it and read!). Once the University Libraries decided to move to OCLC’s WorldCat Local as a systemwide discovery solution, Patti oversaw the transition from UC’s locally managed Melvyl solution to WorldCat Local, a service that she has led since that time.
As these activities suggest, Patti has never been content to limit the scope of her thinking to the UC sphere, as extensive as that is, but has always sought to leverage her UC work in the service of broader professional aims. To further the development of WEST, her group served as the development partner for the Center for Research Libraries’ Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR), a national registry service for shared journal archives. Patti also led the team that proposed a deep partnership with HathiTrust on behalf of UC by building and operating a dedicated metadata management system, Zephir, which for more than 3 years has served as the foundation for HathiTrust’s catalog and metadata distribution services.
As CDL’s Director of Discovery and Delivery systems, Patti is proud to have worked with a tremendously talented team to provide seamless discovery and access to the full panoply of UC’s library collections and scholarly output. Across UC, Patti served on the Heads of Technical Services (HOTS), the Melvyl Advisory Group (MAG), and as Chair of the later systemwide Strategic Advisory Group 2 (SAG 2) for Access and Discovery. She has also served on many external advisory groups, including HathiTrust’s Zephir Advisory Group and Metadata Use and Sharing Advisory Group, as well as the planning committees for NWILL and DLF.
After leaving CDL, Patti hopes to build and install a “Little Free Library” in her front yard, work in her garden, volunteer at the Alameda County Food Bank, and learn how to print on an etching press. As fervently enjoined by another CDL colleague, it is also to be hoped that Patti will one day learn to manage her addiction to hot sauce. We also have faith that in her future endeavors, Patti’s most earnest wish will finally be granted: to be known by her given name of Patricia.
Patti’s wit and incisive intelligence will be sorely missed by her CDL colleagues and by her wide set of contacts in library systems and related services across UC and in the broader professional domain. Please join me in wishing Patti all the very best as she embarks upon new and greater adventures!