About

Donald J. Waters is an independent scholar and a management consultant offering strategic advice and operational analysis in the area scholarly communications. He is currently serving as the inaugural Senior Scholar of the Coalition for Networked Information.

In 2019, he retired from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as the Senior Program Officer for Scholarly Communications after 20 years of service. Before joining the Foundation, he served as the founding Director of the Digital Library Federation (1997-1999), as Associate University Librarian at Yale University (1993-1997), and a variety of other library and information technology positions. Don graduated with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1973.  In 1982, he received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University.

In 1995-96, he co-chaired the Task Force of the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group on Archiving of Digital Information. In 2005-2008, I served on the Library of Congress Section 108 Study Group. From 1999 to 2022, he served on the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). He currently serves on the governing board of directors of the Engineering Information Foundation, the Executive Advisory Council of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and the Advisory Group of the American Council of Learned Society’s Humanities Ebook program. He is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.