Michael Keller

At Stanford, Michael A. Keller is the Ida M. Green University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Publisher of HighWire Press, and Publisher of the Stanford University Press. These titles touch on his major professional preoccupations: commitment to support of research, teaching and learning; effective deployment of information technology hand-in-hand with materials; active involvement in the evolution and growth of scholarly communication. He may be best known at present for his distinctively entrepreneurial style of librarianship. As University Librarian, he endeavors to champion deep collecting of traditional library materials (especially of manuscript and archival materials) concurrent with full engagement in emerging information technologies.

As a result of his work in collection development at Cornell, Berkeley, Yale and Stanford (see below) -- which provided broad exposure to the global publication and bookselling trades -- Keller became convinced of a need for correction in the marketplace of scholarly communications, especially journal publishing. Long involved in the great debate on serials pricing, especially in the arenas of science, technology, and medicine, he has served as advisor, consultant, and committee member to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other scholarly societies. Thus in 1995, in response to scholars' requests for assistance to their scholarly societies, he established the HighWire Press as an enterprise within the Stanford University Libraries to provide online co-publishing services initially to three scholarly journals. As of July 2007, HighWire Press has grown to support high-impact STM journals among more than 50 major scholarly societies. It is also the site creation and host service for the revolutionary, online, third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, released in the Spring of 2000. Based on the successful HighWire model, Keller is now fostering development of additional information tools and services for the scholarly community.

Keller speaks at about thirty professional, high-technology, and scholarly gatherings around the world every year on topics ranging from librarianship, musicology, information topography, to national and global information policy. In addition to consulting work, he serves on the boards of several organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, including the Long Now Foundation, the 10,000-Year Library Initiative of which he co-chairs. He limits his involvement in professional bodies and programs to those he believes most likely to result in concrete action, among which he is proud to list the Digital Library Federation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Pacific Neighborhood Coalition, and the World Economic Forum. Toward the survival of the library profession and betterment of services to future generations of readers, he became co-founder in 1999 of the Stanford-California State Library Institute on 21st Century Librarianship, a continuing-education program focused on issues of leadership and technology in libraries. Keller has consulted for a variety of institutions and programs, including the City of Ferrara in Italy, Newsweek magazine, Princeton and Indiana Universities, and several information technology companies as well as scholarly societies.

Keller was educated at Hamilton College (B.A. Biology, Music 1967), SUNY Buffalo (M.A., Musicology, 1970)), SUNY Geneseo (M.L.S., 1971), and SUNY Buffalo (a.b.d. Ph.D., Musicology). From 1973 to 1981, he served as Music Librarian and Sr. Lecturer in Musicology at Cornell University and then in a similar capacity at UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he also taught musicology at Stanford University and began the complete revision of the definitive Music Research and Reference Materials, an annotated bibliography popularly known as Duckles in honor of its original compiler. Yale called him to the post of Associate University Librarian and Director of Collection Development in 1986. In 1993, he joined the Stanford staff as the Ida M. Green Director of Libraries. In 1994, he was named to his current position of University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources. In 1995, by establishing HighWire Press, he became its publisher, and in April 2000, he was assigned similar strategic duty for the Stanford University Press.