07/26/94

CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558

Susan Perry named college librarian at Mount Holyoke

STANFORD -- Susan Perry, director of departmental systems at the Stanford Data Center, will leave Stanford Aug. 5 to become college librarian at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.

She will be only the fifth person to serve in the position since Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837 as the nation's first college for women.

Perry came to Stanford in 1986 from the library director post at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., to serve as head of the Henry J. Meyer Memorial Library.

During four years in that post, she worked closely with faculty to enhance Meyer's services to undergraduates. She and her staff refocused the collection to better support undergraduate curriculum and they built a now heavily used film collection. She established several electronic classrooms, enhanced the computing cluster in Meyer and built up the Language Lab. During her tenure, Meyer began to offer self-service online searching services to students and faculty.

In 1990, she accepted an offer from John Sack, director of the Data Center, to learn more about the computing services culture by joining the other side of libraries and information resources.

Perry said she made the move because she had become interested in "how we move into an information resources environment that includes both the library and the computer professional in one culture. What we needed in the future was something more homogenous than we had."

At the Data Center, she has guided such projects as:

• The Cooperative for Linked Administrative Systems at Stanford (CLASS), a program that supported the move from paper- based transactions to electronic transactions.
• The Team for Improving Productivity at Stanford (TIPS), a group that represents schools and departments in setting priorities and policies for information systems planning and development.
• Pegasus, a program that provided Macintosh computers to humanities faculty and trained them in their use.
• Portfolio, the new campus-wide information system.
• The Decision Support System (DSS), using software to provide new ways to analyze data.
• Expert Partners, a group of local experts who support departmental computing.

Perry has been a member of the American Library Association Council, the association's governing body. She is co- chair of the Teaching and Learning Working Group of the Coalition for Networked Information, and she currently is serving on the program planning committee for EDUCOM '94, the annual conference on academic computing.

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