RDMLA - Five Months Post Launch

Rong Tang holds a PhD in Information Science from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests center on user behavior research, including mobile news behaviors, data services in libraries, cognitive styles and user experience, usability evaluation, collaborative user behavior, and paradigm shifts in the field of information. She is the founding Director of Simmons Usability Lab. She also serves as the Director of SLIS PhD Program.

Together with Elaine R. Martin, Rong Tang is one of the co-leads of the RDMLA. Rong Tang is the Principal Investigator for an IMLS funded grant “Retooling the Librarian Workforce: Innovative Post-Master’s Certificate Program for Developing Inter-Professional Informationists (IPI).” She serves as the Director for External Relations, Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) from 2017 to 2020.

Elaine Martin joined the Countway Library as the Director and Chief Administrative Officer in 2016. Under her direction she oversees and manages a complex organization with a $12 million budget and one of the largest collections of both current medical research materials and historical and rare collections in the world, holding more than 630,000 volumes. The Countway Library serves both academic and practicing physicians at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Previously, Elaine was employed with the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, where she had been the Director of Library Services leading the library there through a period of transformational change. She also served as the Director of Library Services of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region. In 2018 Elaine was selected as the Janet Doe lecturer. This prestigious award recognizes a member of the Medical Library Association who has made a substantial contribution to its work through leadership, impact on medical librarianship as a profession and effectiveness to teaching and training. Also in 2018, Elaine was selected to be a Fellow of the Medical Library Association. Elaine has her MSLS from Catholic University and her Doctor of Arts (DA) from Simmons University. She has taught numerous classes and published in the areas of medical librarianship, library administration and management and scientific research data management.

Together with Rong Tang, Elaine Martin is the co-leader of the RDMLA project. Elaine is also an adjunct faculty at Simmons University, School of Library and Information, and the co-PI for an IMLS-funded grant “Retooling the Librarian Workforce: Innovative Post-Master’s Certificate Program for Developing Inter-Professional Informationists (IPI).”