Karen Estlund joined Colorado State University as the Dean of Libraries in 2019. Prior to joining Colorado State University, Karen served as the Associate Dean for Technology and Digital Strategies for the Pennsylvania State Libraries and coordinated collaborations with the Penn State University Press. While at Penn State, she also acted as Associate Dean for Collections, Research, and Scholarly Communications and Associate Dean for Learning and Undergraduate Services. Karen co-led university efforts to successfully pass an Open Access policy and directed efforts to integrate scholarly metadata across open and proprietary systems.
Karen served as the head of the Digital Scholarship Center at the University of Oregon, where she supported the publication of digital editions of the Oregon Petrarch Open Book project, Archaeology and Landscape in the Mongolian Altai, and We Are the Face of Oaxaca and oversaw the library’s journal publishing and repository programs. Karen was a founding journal editorial board member of an open access, open peer review multi-modal journal, Ada: a Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. In her first role as a librarian, at the University of Utah, she launched the collaborative institutional repository between the Marriott Library, medical, and law libraries.
Karen has served on the coordinating committee for IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), Fedora Leaders, Samvera (formerly Hydra) Steering Group, and the Rightsstatements.org technical committee.