University of Miami Libraries is pleased to announce the appointment of Rita Johnston as the new head of Digital Initiatives. Rita will lead the growth and evolution of digital services in support of the teaching, learning, and scholarship needs of the University. Supervising the Digital Initiatives team, she will manage digital services to achieve maximum visibility and use of digital collections and will leverage team expertise and technologies to expand capacity of on-demand digital services to meet faculty at their point of need. Additionally, she will identify and test digital tools and technologies to advance teaching and scholarship with digitized primary and secondary source materials. Working with colleagues, she will share responsibility to advance the Libraries’ digital preservation program and ensure long-term access to institutionally created digital content and research assets.
Prior to her appointment at the University of Miami Libraries, Rita served as the digital production librarian for the J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections & University Archives at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In this role, she oversaw digitization and was responsible for the arrangement, description, and publication of digitized archival materials to the Atkins Library’s online collection portal. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and a Master of Science in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Rita will be working in a remote capacity from her location in Charlotte, North Carolina, and will be on-site at the University of Miami Libraries on a quarterly basis.
Rita Johnston can be reached at ritajohnston@miami.edu.
