New TDL Director Debra Hanken Kurtz
Debra Hanken Kurtz, Assistant Director of ITS and Head of Digital Experience Services at Duke University Libraries, has been appointed as the new director of the Texas Digital Library (TDL), a consortium of academic libraries in Texas that provides shared services in support of research and learning.
Kurtz will take over the duties of current director Mark McFarland on June 1. McFarland, who announced in November 2012 he would step down from his role, co-founded the Texas Digital Library in 2007, and has served as director or co-director of the organization since that time. McFarland will continue his duties as Director of Information Technology for the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin.
“Through the TDL, Mark has built a consortium of libraries and librarians who are committed to advancing library services and values, and we will never be able to adequately acknowledge all his significant contributions.” said Dana Rooks, Chair of the Texas Digital Library Governing Board and Dean of Libraries at the University of Houston. “Debra Hanken Kurtz brings with her the skills and experience necessary to continue the growth of the TDL in this new phase of its existence. We look forward with great anticipation to what the future holds for TDL under her leadership.”
At Duke University Libraries, Kurtz provided leadership and direction for the Libraries’ digital collections, overseeing multiple facets of the Duke University Library’s web presence and leading early planning efforts for the library’s institutional repository. During her tenure at the Duke, she was an active partner within the Triangle Research Libraries Network and has been a voice for Kuali OLE, an open-source integrated library system built by and for academic and research libraries.
Kurtz earned a B.A. in English from Arizona State University and her M.L.S. from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Texas Digital Library (TDL), headquartered in Austin, Texas, provides infrastructure, tools and services to its member organizations, aiming to enhance open access to scholarly materials, preserve digital collections, and encourage collaboration among scholars and librarians throughout the state of Texas. Beginning in 2005 as a partnership among four of the state’s Association of Research Libraries (ARL) universities, the TDL has since grown to represent large and small institutions of higher learning from every region of the state. Its suite of services includes hosting of DSpace institutional repositories, peer-reviewed online journals, and software for managing submission, approval, and publication of electronic theses and dissertations. For more information about the Texas Digital Library, please visit main-migrate.tdl.org.