Mike Keller

As university librarian for the past 25 years, Keller has been a national and international leader in transitioning university libraries to digital formats and an advocate for the digital sharing of information resources around the world. He has long been engaged in developing technology for teaching support, including introducing the Coursework platform in 2004.

Soon after he arrived at Stanford from Yale, Keller made innovations that have served scholars and students by exploiting the potential of network effects and information technologies. Simultaneously, Keller renewed the commitment and acquisitions programs of the University Libraries in building broadly useful general collections and special collections that afford distinctive opportunities for research at Stanford.

In 1995, he founded HighWire Press, an internet publishing service supporting scholarly societies that were self-publishing (such as Science Magazine and the Journal of Biological Chemistry), which was spun out in 2014. In 1999, Keller supported and found funding for the LOCKSS preservation and access application that is now used in hundreds of individual institutions and many national settings. LOCKSS is also the technology underlying a related company, CLOCKSS, that since 2010 — with the participation of hundreds of libraries and hundreds of publishers — has provided a “dark archive” solution for e-journals.

Beginning in 2002, Stanford Libraries collaborated with Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University to digitize ancient, medieval, and early modern manuscripts. That project led Stanford Libraries’ curators and technologists, along with numerous manuscript scholars from North America and Europe, to develop requirements for a general digital environment for streaming images of manuscripts and other objects of scholarship and for teaching. That long interactive process resulted in the International Image Interoperability Framework and the related application known as Mirador, a web-based image-viewing platform that offers “the ability to zoom, display, compare and annotate images from around the world”.

Keller was educated at Hamilton College (biology, music) and then studied musicology at State University of New York at Buffalo (MA and ABD). He earned an MLS from SUNY/Geneseo. He has taught at Cornell University and Stanford University, was guest-professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was a Siemens Stiftung Lecturer.

He has been a member of the boards of Hamilton College, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, Long Now Foundation, Japan’s National Institute for Informatics, and the National Library of China. He was a Senior Presidential Fellow of the Council on Library and Information Resources and has been appointed by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences to be a member of the Board on Research Data Integrity, the Study Group on an Agenda for Research on Copyright, and the Committee on the Responsible Conduct of Science.

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2008, Keller was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. In 2014, he was named a Sarum Canon by the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury (UK) Cathedral. Stanford awarded its highest honor, the Cuthbertson Award, to Keller in June of 2015 and in January 2016 the Republic of Estonia gave Keller the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana for his service as a foreigner in support of Estonia and its cultural institutions.

He is a frequent speaker at professional, high-technology, and scholarly gatherings around the world on topics ranging from librarianship, academic publishing and information topography to national and global information policy.