Jill Morris is the Executive Director of PALCI, the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration & Innovation, a large regional nonprofit library consortium made up of 72 academic and research libraries in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and West Virginia. Since 2009 Jill has enjoyed playing leadership roles in large library consortia where her primary responsibilities have centered around organizational leadership, collaborative collections, resource sharing, strategic innovation, and eResource licensing and negotiations. Jill became PALCI's Executive Director in January 2019, after previously serving as the organization's Senior Program Officer and Associate Director. Prior to her time at PALCI, Jill was the Assistant Director and Interim Executive Director of the statewide NC LIVE consortium, supporting 200 public and academic libraries in North Carolina. Jill received her MSLS from UNC Chapel Hill and holds a BA in History and Adolescent Education from SUNY Geneseo.
My role as the Executive Director of a large and diverse academic library consortium and nonprofit organization, has given me both a great appreciation for the challenges faced by those in our industry today, and the power of an organization like NISO to effect needed change that shapes the ways information-focused organizations accomplish their work collaboratively. I am highly passionate about ensuring collaboration may occur between libraries, publishers and other information service providers in order to effectively serve library users that seek information, and I see the connective framework that NISO provides as a critical channel for supporting communication, interoperability across providers and systems, collaboration, and meaningful innovation. My leadership of cross-consortial library infrastructure projects that center on the practical application of standards and recommended practices, such as Project ReShare, Hyku for Consortia, and the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project, are what led PALCI to partner and join NISO as a consortium. Since joining, my roles working on other initiatives, like the NISO CDL Recommended Practice and as a co-PI for the IMLS-funded Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project, has given me useful insight into and experience working directly within NISO governance structures. I am committed to bringing this passion and experience, along with my years of experience working within consortia and libraries as one of NISO’s core constituencies to further advocate for NISO’s mission and support its strategic plan.