Abstract
Lloyd Davidson is the Life Sciences Librarian and Bibliographer and Head of Access Services in Northwestern’s Seeley G. Mudd Library for Science and Engineering. He is a member of Sigma Xi, AAAS, several library societies, and the American Society of Protozoologists and was chair of the Chicago Chapter of the American Society for Information Science for a number of years. He has an MA in Paleontology and a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an MLIS from Indiana University at Bloomington. Several years ago he served a year as a Fellow in the Bernice L. Kaplan Humanities Center at Northwestern, during which he studied the ways in which faculty from all disciplines use electronic communication, particularly email, and the Internet.
At Dominican University in River Forest, IL, he served for a number of years as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Library and Information Science, during which tenure he taught classes on Science Reference and Intellectual Property. He also teaches occasional biology courses at Loyola University in Chicago. From 1976 to 1982 he was a member of the biology faculty at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana.
He served on the American Library Association (ALA) Presidential Task Force on Ebooks, until it was disbanded in 2003, was invited to the Whitehouse Briefing on Libraries in 2000, and over the last 10 years has organized a number of major programs for the ALA annual meetings on topics such as XML, Digital Rights Management Systems, Electronic Books, Digital Object Identifiers, and the Future of the Library and of Fair Use. In 2001 he won the annual award for the best submitted paper at the Illinois American College and Research Libraries meetings with one titled “Public Knowledge Under Private Law” that covered the impending loss of free and open access to scholarly information as print materials become digitized. He has written and spoken on many of these topics in a number of venues.
In 2002 he accepted an appointment as the protozoologist-in-residence at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL) in Mammoth Lakes, California, where he and his wife, Arden Davidson, began a long-term project to research the ecology, physiology, and taxonomy of the protozoa that live in Mono Lake, a highly alkaline, hypersaline lake at Lee Vining, California. He and Arden presented a paper on this topic at the annual American Society of Protozoologists meetings in May of 2003. They are continuing this research at Loyola University in Chicago.
Lloyd is also becoming increasingly well known as a landscape nature photographer.