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The 2023 Council Election: Slate of Nominees

At the upcoming BSA Annual Meeting on January 27, 2023 the Society will announce the election a new slate of members to the Council. Active members will be invited to vote electronically in starting January 16, with voting closing on January 27, 2023 at 2:30pm ET.

In accordance with the Society’s by-laws and following published guidance for diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Nominating Committee assembles and presents a full slate of nominees to the membership for a vote at the Annual Meeting. Assembling a full slate for a vote – rather than presenting individual candidates in a competitive election, as some other organizations do – affords us the opportunity to assemble a group that carry out the mission and reflect the values of BSA, as well as work toward the goals set by the Council in the Equity Action Plan. The Nominating Committee recognizes that other models may better serve the BSA in meeting its EAP goals in the future, and in the coming years the Council has committed to a full by-laws review and revision to ensure that the Society’s governance model aligns with its values.

This year the Nominating Committee was Chaired by Barbara A. Shailor.  Heather Wolfe, Heather O’Donnell, Todd Pattison, Douglas Pfeiffer, Jacinta Saffold, and Curtis Small served with her; Erin McGuirl and Caroline Duroselle-Melish also served ex officio in an advisory capacity. Candidates were carefully considered after the placement of an open call for nominees in September of this year.

The Nominating Committee is proud to present the Slate of members of the Council Class of 2026. BSA members will receive information by email with instructions for electronic voting.


Nominees

Mary Crawford, Stanford University
Mary Crawford has been a collector of English and American literature for the past forty years. Author collections, in first editions and primary material, include Dorothy L. Sayers, Mary Webb, Jane Austen, Isak Dinesen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rebecca West, Madeleine L’Engle, Kate Seredy, May Sinclair and the Brönte sisters. In 2010, Mary curated bi-coastal exhibitions at the Grolier Club and Stanford University Libraries related to the twentieth-century British writer, Mary Webb; she wrote Mary Webb: Neglected Genius, the two-volume book published to coincide with these exhibitions. Concurrent with the exhibition, Mary also led the Grolier Club annual Poetry Reading featuring Mary Webb and hosted the American premier of the dramatic reading, “My Wife Did a Bit of Scribbling.” Mary serves on the board of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, where she is currently Treasurer and Chair of the Finance Committee. She was head of the RBS Audit Committee from 2013-2018. Mary is a member of the Grolier Club of New York (Special Functions Committee), and the Bibliographical Society of America (Development Committee). Crawford retired as a Senior Vice President of Morgan Stanley in 2019, where she ran a financial planning team in Palo Alto, California.

Robert D. Montoya, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies & CalRBS
Robert D. Montoya is an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, School of Education and Information Studies, Director of UCLA’s California Rare Book School, and Director of the Library, Ethics, and Justice Lab. His research interests generally include global bibliography and print culture; library history; international and comparative librarianship; information representation and positionality; knowledge organization; and critical, ethical, and justice-oriented LIS work. His book with The MIT Press, Power of Position: Classification and the Biodiversity Sciences, describes and deconstructs how classification systems, data and information structures, and information work (including that done in libraries and museums), passively and overtly wield great power over the social and natural worlds. He is currently working on a monograph on the ethics of print and book culture in global international library programing and development, tentatively titled, Bibliography, Print Culture, and Global Librarianship Across Borders: Ethics and Epistemic Power. He received his PhD from the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, a MLIS with a specialization in rare books, print and visual culture from UCLA, and a MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, UCLA, Indiana University, the National Science Foundation, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, U.S. State Department, U.S. Embassy, Kosovo, and the National Library of Kosovo.

Andrew T. Nadell, M.D., San Francisco, CA
Andrew T. Nadell, M.D. began collecting early printed books as a medical student at Duke University, during a research year reading medical sociology in London.   His M.Sc. dissertation on competing health practitioners and practices provided the basis for his initial collecting interest: medicine as a profession, especially in seventeenth-century England.  In 1977, the Duke University Medical Center Library mounted a catalogued exhibition, “Medical Politicks: the Education and Governance of Doctors.”  In 1996, selections from Dr. Nadell’s collection were exhibited in “Doctors of Medicine: a Social History of the Profession” at the Grolier Club, and later at the Perkins Library at Duke.  With his wife Eleanore Ramsey, he also collects books, bindings, and drawings of the Gothic Revival, many illustrated in the Grolier Gazette, 2013.  For the past 30 years, Dr. Nadell has focused his collecting on books and manuscripts from the Renaissance and early modern periods that relate to the changing “culture of profession.”   Dr. Nadell is the United States national delegate and councilor of the International Society for the History of Medicine, governor of the Academia Panamericana de Historia de la Medicina, treasurer and governor of the American Osler Society, and a liveryman of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London.  He is a longtime a member of the Grolier Club, the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie, and the Société Royale des Bibliophiles et Iconophiles de Belgique.  He has practiced medicine in San Francisco for 45 years.

Elizabeth Ott, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Elizabeth Ott is the interim Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and interim Director of Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, she was the Frank Borden Hanes Curator of Rare Books at Wilson Library. Additionally, she is an adjunct lecturer at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she teaches regular courses on bibliography and rare book librarianship. She has also worked in various roles at the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and Rare Book School in Virginia. Elizabeth completed her doctoral work at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include pedagogical approaches to bibliography, nineteenth-century British publishing, library history, and bibliography beyond the hand-press era.