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“Dr. Mark Sandler is a library leader of great vision whose innovative ideas and persuasive skills carried to fruition two of the most impactful initiatives in the history of digitization,” said Mark Stover, Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award Committee chair and dean of the Oviatt Library at California State University, Northridge. “His founding of the Text Creation Partnership brought together a number of academic libraries with Proquest, and this collaboration produced the seminal Early English Books Online database. Mark also championed the Google Book Digitization Project among the member libraries of the influential Big Ten Academic Alliance, thus greatly expanding the corpus of digitized books for both the Google project and the HathiTrust repository.”

“During his long career, Mark was known for his effectiveness as a negotiator, his uncanny ability to bring about consensus on contentious issues, his collaborative professional relationships, his strategic vision, and his far-reaching ideas,” continued Stover. “From his early arguments in favor of cooperative collection development to his unwavering commitment to the ideal of digitizing all U.S. federal documents, Mark Sandler has left his imprint on the world of academic libraries like no one else.”

“It is a tribute to his wide-ranging influence that twelve diverse luminaries of the library world wrote detailed letters supporting his nomination, including several university library deans, the head of a major academic library consortium, a library school faculty member, the vice president of an important library technology vendor, and the executive director of the HathiTrust,” Stover added. “Mark Sandler is, for all the reasons stated above, this year’s highly deserving recipient of the Hugh C. Atkinson Award.”