Presented here is the core Open Knowledge team at the Mina Rees Library. Explore their interests and backgrounds!
Elvis Bakaitis (they/them) is currently the Head of Reference at the Mina Rees Library. They also coordinate the Open Knowledge Fellowship, training doctoral and MA students to utilize Open Educational Resources (OER) in their teaching and scholarly practice.
Bakaitis serves on the University LGBTQ Council and as a board member of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, advocating for queer, trans and gender non-conforming students across CUNY. They are also a board member of the national LGBTQ+ History Association. Their research is supported by grants from Harvard University, Duke University, Rockefeller Archive Center, CUNY Research Foundation, and the American Library Association. As a Principal Investigator on behalf of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 2020, Bakaitis secured the largest grant in the organization’s history, $90,000 awarded by the Mellon Foundation.
As Scholarly Communication Librarian and University Liaison, Jill Cirasella leads the Mina Rees Library’s scholarly communication initiatives and works with campus colleagues to advance scholarship for the public good. She also offers instruction to the full CUNY research community on a variety of scholarly communication topics (open access, copyright, fair use, publication contracts, journal evaluation, research metrics, and more) and liaises with other CUNY librarians on scholarly communication matters. Her own research focus is scholarly communication, broadly construed: recent projects look at concerns surrounding open access dissertations, attitudes about practice-based library literature, and the professional experiences of hard-of-hearing librarians. She served as chair of the editorial board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication from 2019 through 2021, and she recently co-founded the Journal of Graduate Librarianship.
Donna Davey is an adjunct Reference & Scholarly Communication Librarian at the Mina Rees Library. Before coming to the Graduate Center, she was a special collections librarian at various archives in New York City and a reference librarian at the New York Public Library. In addition to her MLS from Pratt Institute, Donna holds an MA in Liberal Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center.
Margaret Miller is an adjunct Reference and Digital Outreach Librarian at the Mina Rees Library. Margaret Miller is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University. She also works in the Brooklyn College Library, staffing the reference desk, creating information resources, and overseeing course reserves. Besides her MS in Library Science, Margaret holds a Master’s in the history of theology from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in history from the University of Oxford.
Patrick McGee (he/him) is the Open Educational Resources Specialist at the Mina Rees Library. He is pursuing an MA in History and MLS in Information Studies at Queens College, where he is researching the intellectual history of fascism, and questions of modernity and postmodernity in archival theory. He works as a Research Fellow with the CUNY Archival Technologies Lab where he is assisting in research surrounding military artificial intelligence, international law, and evidence. He previously worked as an Associate Archivist on the CUNY Cultivating Archives & Institutional Memory Project and as an Information Literacy Fellow with the Library Information Literacy Advisory Committee.
Maura Smale is the executive chief librarian of the Graduate Center. She was previously the chief librarian and a professor at City Tech, where she worked with library faculty and staff to empower and support City Tech students, faculty, and staff in their academic pursuits. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University and an MLIS from Pratt Institute. She served as project director for the U.S. Department of Education Title V grant-funded project A Living Laboratory and co-director of the City Tech OpenLab. She is also a member of the steering committee of the CUNY Games Network. Her research interests include undergraduate academic culture, game-based learning, open educational technologies, scholarly communications, and critical librarianship.
