Organization
Our Mission
K|N Consultants partners with academic institutions and organizations, academic, national, and public libraries, learned and scholarly societies, scholarly publishers and university presses, government agencies, private foundations, and other mission-driven organizations to foster broad knowledge infrastructure transformation through innovative, collaborative solutions that result in more efficient and nimble systems of knowledge creation and dissemination and in expanded and more sustainable educational opportunities for disadvantaged populations.
Board of Directors
K|N’s Board of Directors is comprised of leaders in academic institutions and libraries, learned societies, and scholarly publishing. The Board of Directors supports K|N’s strategic activities and monitors the direction and impact of the organization.
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Cheryl Ball
Independent Publishing Consultant; Executive Director of Council of Editors of Learned Journals; Secretary-Treasurer of K|N's Board of DirectorsCheryl E. Ball is an independent publishing consultant and Executive Director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Her consulting work helps academics accomplish their dream projects while rebuilding their relationship with work. She is Senior Editor for the diamond open-access journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which has been publishing scholarly multimedia content since 1996. In 2010, Ball received tenure at Illinois State University with the first (she could find) open-access, interactive portfolio. Her research in editorial workflows and digital publishing infrastructures can be found in multiple journals and edited collections, as well as on her personal repository. Ball has an M.F.A. in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she completed the school’s first electronic, interactive thesis, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University.
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Robert Hilliker
Associate Provost, Rowan University LibraryRobert Hilliker currently serves as Associate Provost of the Rowan University Library. His “turn” to libraries began when he realized, midway through his thesis, that the librarians he knew led the most balanced lives of any academics. A brief stint working on the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Modernist Journals Project showed him that he could marry cutting-edge technology with librarianship and the deal was sealed. Robert has previously held positions at the Hotchkiss School’s Edsel Ford Memorial Library, Columbia University’s Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, and the Rutgers University Libraries. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University, an M.L.I.S. in Digital Libraries from Rutgers University, and a B.A. (Honors) in English from the University of British Columbia. He can be followed on Twitter at @infomnivore.
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Christopher Long
Dean of the College of Arts & Letters and Dean of the Honors College, Michigan State UniversityChristopher P. Long is a Michigan State University Foundation Professor and Dean of two colleges: the College of Arts & Letters and the MSU Honors College. He is committed to the transformative power of a liberal arts education and is a leading advocate for public scholarship, open access, and values-enacted approaches to academic life. Dean Long is also an expert in both ancient Greek and contemporary continental philosophy, and his extensive publication record includes four books. He has multiple Mellon Foundation funded projects, including the Less Commonly Taught Languages Partnership with the Big 10 Academic Alliance; the Public Philosophy Journal; and the HuMetricsHSS initiative, a values-based framework designed to empower faculty to tell more textured stories about the impact of their scholarship and pedagogy.
To learn more about Dean Long’s administrative approach and his research visit his personal website or reach him on Mastodon at @cplong@hcommons.social.
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Polly Thistlethwaite
Professor, Mina Rees Library, CUNY Graduate Center; Chair of K|N's Board of DirectorsPolly Thistlethwaite is Professor in the Mina Rees Library at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, having served there as Chief Librarian 2010-2020 and as CUNY’s interim Dean of Libraries in 2020. Queer archival work and AIDS activism starting in the late 1980s primed Polly’s focus on open, widely accessible, and networked collections. In the pre-digital era, library entrance policies prevented access to knowledge for those who desperately sought it. Now, with access to research brokered by electronic publishers through library subscriptions, we continue to deny the greatest part of access to scholarship. Higher education must square reader online access policies with professed missions to serve the public good. Academic publishing serves the narrowest of purposes if only elite readers can reach a text to read it.
Bylaws and Financial Information
K|N is governed by a Board of Directors that supports K|N’s strategic activities and monitors the direction and impact of the organization. The following documents provide a framework for and summary of K|N’s operational activities.