Michele Gibney, VPO for Privacy & Surveillance
Michele Gibney is SPARC’s visiting program officer for Privacy & Surveillance to assist in developing awareness, education and strategies to deal with privacy threats faced by libraries and their users within the academic infrastructure. In addition, Michele is also the Head of Publishing and Scholarship Support at University of the Pacific in California, where she manages the institutional repository, Scholarly Commons. Michele joined Pacific in 2017 after working as the University Archivist at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for two years. She completed her MLIS from San Jose State University in 2009 and has a Masters in Asian Studies from the University of San Francisco (2006). Her undergraduate B.A. is in English and the Honors program from University of Puget Sound in Washington.
Michele is the sub-committee chair for OER under the library consortia SCELC’s Scholarly Communications Committee, where she also serves as a member. She has also served as a member on the SPARC Data Analysis Working Group and the Open Education Network’s 2021 summit planning committee.
Since 2018, Michele has been involved in several international collaborations within higher education. In 2018-2019, she spent three months in Kosovo at the University for Business and Technology supporting the UBT Knowledge Center repository launch with partial funding from a Fulbright Specialist grant. She has also traveled and presented at the University of Tirana in Albania and Linnaeus University in Sweden. Her current research interests are focused on DEI in libraries, student participation in scholarly communications, OER program management and implementation, institutional repositories in a service science model, and – of course! – privacy and surveillance in academia.