Lisa Palmer, Institutional Repository Librarian at the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is a pioneer in the field of medical library repositories and one of our 2014 IR All Stars. Among her many accomplishments as an IR admin, we’d especially like to highlight Lisa’s trailblazing efforts to unite medical librarians and her innovative approach to data management. Through the work of Lisa and her dedicated support team, UMass Medical School’s repository, eScholarship@UMMS, has become an ever-expanding and hugely influential player in the medical repository field.
At the 2014 Medical Library Association (MLA) annual meeting, Lisa volunteered to organize and lead a first-of-its-kind Digital Commons user group meeting for medical librarians. Open to both DC customers and non-customers alike, the community meeting was a resounding success, far exceeding attendance expectations and helping to establish institutional repositories as an important topic for medical libraries. Along with Soutter Library Director Elaine Martin, Lisa did an exceptional job of choosing session topics, posing thoughtful questions, and curating the conversation. Lisa’s article, “Cultivating Scholarship: The Role of Institutional Repositories in Health Sciences Libraries,” recently published in Against the Grain, further supports the idea that medical repositories play an important role in supporting essential campus needs and meeting new National Institutes of Health open access mandates.
Lisa has also established herself as a forward-thinking advocate for research data in medical repositories and an invaluable resource for meeting faculty data needs on campus. When a faculty member published work in PLOS ONE but didn’t know how to meet the requirement that the accompanying data be made open access and available online, Lisa offered eScholarship as a solution—a strategy that she continues to employ with success. In addition to being one of our Digital Commons Data Pioneers, Lisa also serves as the Technical Editor for the Journal of eScience Librarianship, an “open access, peer-reviewed journal that advances the theory and practice of librarianship with a special focus on services related to data-driven research in the physical, biological, social, and medical sciences, including public health.” Her presentations, including a 2011 webinar with fellow medical librarians Dan Kipnis and Ann Koopman, and presentations at national conferences, are great resources for medical librarians and all librarians interested in institutional repositories, open access, altmetrics, and library publishing.
To see the full list of Lisa’s scholarly work, visit her SelectedWorks page.