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Patricia Cruse retires from CDL

January 12, 2015 Author: Perry WillettCategories:

Trisha Cruse has left CDL in January, 2015 to take a position with DataONE involving data sharing, management, and preservation; details on her new position will be announced in the future.

Trisha has had a long and very successful career at UC. After receiving her B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature and M.L.I.S. from UC Berkeley, she began her professional career as Social Sciences Reference Librarian, Information Technologies Specialist, and Electronic Services Librarian at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, where she also pursued her love of jazz and good food. She arrived at UC San Diego in 1995 as Coordinator of Government Information, and came to CDL in 1999 as Senior Associate where she worked in the Shared Content group on digital government information initiatives and in Digital Library Services (my group at that time). In 2003, she became director of the new Digital Preservation Program at CDL and in 2006, this program joined five others in the configuration we have (with a few modifications) today.

In 2009, Trisha transformed the Digital Preservation Program into the UC Curation Center, UC3, in recognition of the need to focus on the entire life cycle of digital content and the fact that content that is curated from the beginning has a much better chance of being preserved over the long term. UC3 has become known in the community as a leader on many fronts, from sponsoring several international conferences to participation in the NSF-funded DataONE initiative to development of the DMPTool and now Dash, the layer on top of Merritt to enable easy deposit of research data. All of these activities have been possible due to Trisha’s vision, energy, community building and dedication to making UC’s research output widely available.

CDL and the UC community have benefitted from Trisha’s work as a real trailblazer, and indeed she was named a Digital Preservation Pioneer by the Library of Congress in 2010. She leaves a strong and dedicated team, an excellent suite of services, and much potential for future progress in this domain.

I have asked Felicia Poe to step in as Interim Director. Felicia’s administrative experience will allow her to quickly get up to speed. There will be an open recruitment to fill the permanent director position in the future.

It has been a real pleasure working with Trisha and seeing her make such a difference to CDL, UC and the broader community. Please join me in wishing Trisha the very best for the future, whatever it may bring–and we know we will continue to see her name in lights.

–Laine Farley

CDLInfo articles on Trisha’s career milestones: