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John Weise
Associate Director of Library Information Technology and Head of Digital Library Applications
University of Michigan

Statement of Purpose:  I would like to bring to Samvera Steering my perspective, skills, and experience having been involved in a number of digital library initiatives and partnerships since 1995. I am very interested in considering the wide ranging challenges and opportunities facing the Samvera community. While I believe I will be able to draw on my background, I also feel that to succeed as a member of Steering I will need to listen carefully to community members, and learn from the other members of Steering, because the Samvera Community is like nothing else in my experience.

I have been at Michigan, doing digital library work, since 1995. I am a librarian with a technical background. For a number of years, my job was a mix of creating the ImageClass portion of a system called DLXS, and using it to deploy image collections for access. 

In 2008, I became head of the Digital Library Production Service. We were deep into book digitization as a Google Books partner, and ran our own scanning operation as well. We were also actively building HathiTrust. Our involvement in these initiatives continues to this day. A few years ago Michigan joined Samvera, Fedora, and IIIF. 

We did a little reorganizing in 2016 and now I am the head of Digital Library Applications, which is a group of 11 people working on contributing to the development of our next generation repository initiativesrepositories, HathiTrust, and our legacy systems (mainly DLXS and DSPace). I also became associate director, where I partner with the director in the planning, administrative, and logistical business of the division. Library IT at Michigan is comprised of 5 departments and 50+ staff. 

I am grateful for this opportunity to run for a spot on Steering, and I look forward to working together to make progress on a number of shared challenges.