| gailmac@vt.edu |  |
| Professor, University Libraries Director, Scholarly Communication |
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| NDLTD 2007 ETD Leadership Award | |
| Botetourt County Historial Society 2014 Emily Gordon Honts Heritage Award | |
Curriculum VitaeCV Summary
- Education
- Employment History
- Publications (selected)
- Presentations (selected)
- Grants
- Participation in the Profession
- Service to Virginia Tech
Gail McMillan is the director of Scholarly Communication at Virginia Tech’s University Libraries. Upon completing a Master of Arts degree in early American history and a Masters in Library Science, specializing in rare books, manuscripts, and archives, at the University of Maryland, College Park, she became an Archivist at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1982 she joined the University Libraries faculty at Virginia Tech where she earned Continued Appointment and promotion through ranks to Professor. She is known for pragmatically adapting new technologies for traditional library services and resources.
Named the Director of the Scholarly Communications Project (SCP) in 1994, she lead the development of online services and resources such as electronic course reserves, access to news reports from a television network and regional and international newspapers, and the VT ImageBase, a digital image database. EJournal hosting was the founding SCP initiative, and continues today with three dozen titles. In 2013 library publishing services were revitalized with additional staff and software support (e.g., OJS, OCS), and participation in the Library Publishing Coalition.
Virginia Tech set the national and international standard for electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) and McMillan played a significant role in this initiative beginning in 1995. Under her direction, SCP developed ETD-db, the software that managed all aspects of ETDs from submission and approval to access until 2013. In 2011 VTechWorks was established under McMillan's direction to host and make publicly available the university's scholarship and research. She is a founding member and serves on the steering committees of both the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations and the MetaArchive Cooperative, which broke new ground when it began in 2004 with its distributed digital preservation strategy. McMillan is regularly invited throughout the world to make presentations and publish about Virginia Tech’s scholarly communications initiatives.