Welcome Roxanne Shirazi, Dissertation Research Librarian!

Roxanne Shirazi has been working as Adjunct Reference and Digital Outreach Librarian at the Graduate Center Library since fall 2013, and she has been pursing her MALS degree at the Graduate Center since a little before that. But this spring, Roxanne joins the library staff full time as the Graduate Center’s Dissertation Research Librarian.

Roxanne will coordinate and implement the library’s archiving and distribution of dissertations, theses, and capstone projects (ETDs). She has already set brand new ETD deposit procedures with instructions in place! Roxanne will offer guidance to dissertation and thesis authors about deposit processes, copyright, formatting, as well as the actual research required for quality graduate work. She will manage the Graduate Center ETD section of the CUNY Academic Works open access repository and ProQuest’s ETD Administrator. At the end of this month, Roxanne wraps up the first deposit period of her tenure, the first in the Graduate Center’s history that is fully electronic.

Roxanne just completed her MALS degree, depositing her thesis (Yellow Dust Abode: The Hawley-Suski Letters, 1942-1945) with the Graduate Center earlier this month. Her other research interests focus on digital scholarship, film studies, documentary photography, labor history, material culture and digital humanities. Roxanne is founding editor of the collaborative blog dh+lib (“where the digital humanities and librarianship meet”), sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Roxanne earned her MSLIS from Pratt Institute, with an Advanced Certificate in Archives, where her concentration was in special collections, with coursework about technical services, conservation, reference, and outreach for library and archival materials in print, audiovisual, photographic and digital formats. Prior to becoming a librarian, she managed the Columbia University Bookstore.

Roxanne’s one year appointment on a Substitute Assistant Professor line will culminate in a formal search for a librarian to appoint permanently to the Dissertation Research Librarian position later this year.

About the Author

Prof. Polly Thistlethwaite is CUNY's Interim University Dean for Library Services.