Prof. Jill Cirasella Joins the Graduate Center Library

Jill CirasellaThe Graduate Center Library welcomes Jill Cirasella, Associate Professor, as its Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication. Jill will coordinate reference, circulation, and interlibrary loan services, and she will also lead many of the Grad Center Library’s scholarly communications initiatives. She joins the Graduate Center after eight years as a reference and instruction librarian at Brooklyn College, where she developed expertise in science librarianship, peer mentoring, and evolving modes of scholarly communication, especially open access to academic literature.

Jill is engaged with a variety of issues relevant to scholarly communication. She co-founded both the Open Access @ CUNY blog and the Open Access Publishing Network @ CUNY discussion group on the CUNY Academic Commons. She also co-drafted a successful University Faculty Senate resolution in support of the creation of a CUNY-wide open access institutional repository and was subsequently appointed to the UFS Open Access Advisory Group, which is now working to develop a CUNY-wide repository. She co-chairs LACUNY’s Scholarly Communications Roundtable.

Jill co-founded and for two years co-chaired the LACUNY Junior Faculty Research Roundtable, a peer-mentoring group for untenured library faculty at CUNY. Now in its fifth vibrant year, the Roundtable remains one of her lasting achievements.

Before joining Brooklyn College, Jill worked as a librarian at the Boston Architectural Center and the Dance Notation Bureau, a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of dances through a system of notation called Labanotation.  She continues to serve on the Dance Notation Bureau’s Professional Advisory Committee, as well as to study ballet and modern dance.

Jill earned a B.A. in computer science from Amherst College, an M.S. in library and information science from Simmons College, and an M.S. in logic from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, where she wrote her thesis on quantum and classical algorithms for finding cycles in graphs.  Her background in computer science and logic informs both her daily work as a librarian and her publications, which include two appendices in the book Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists and the article “Quantum Computing: Selected Internet Resources for Librarians, Researchers, and the Casually Curious.”  Other recent publications include “A Librarian’s Defense of the Practicable over the Perfect in Scholarly Communication,” “From Art on the Wall to Something for All: How an Academic Library Turned Its Art Collection into a Campus Attraction,” and “Peers Don’t Let Peers Perish: Encouraging Research and Scholarship Among Junior Library Faculty.”

Jill’s new GC email: jcirasella@gc.cuny.edu.

About the Author

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