Bio—Marcia Adams

Marcia Adams is the Assistant Director of Technical Services, a division which comprises five centralized departments of the Libraries. Technical Services Division staff perform services for all twenty branches as well as other Smithsonian units, serving as specialized consultants and expert resources in the fields of library and information science. They also provide technical support for the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS).

Adams is responsible for the Acquisitions Services, Cataloging Services and Interlibrary Loan Services, Metadata Services and Preservation Services departments within the Libraries and oversees the continuing re-engineering of the Libraries’ business processes. Adams chairs the Data Standards Committee and is part of a Smithsonian-wide team investigating capabilities of library systems as a precursor to procurement of a new system.

Adams was appointed Assistant Director for Technical Services in 2004. She joined the Libraries as assistant systems administrator in 1987. Prior to her current position, she was the department head of the Libraries’ Systems unit, overseeing the implementation of the automated library system, SIRIS.  Earlier in her career, Adams worked as a reference librarian and cataloger at Purdue University Library, as a public services librarian at the Morrison-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana, and later as a systems librarian at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. She has a B.A. from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. She earned her Masters in Library Science from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. In December 2007, Marcia was appointed to the Federal Library Information Network Advisory Committee (FAC), and appointed Chair of the FAC in 2009.—Liz O'Brien