John Lowe has accepted the role of technical lead and manager for the CollectionSpace service at UC Berkeley. CollectionSpace is an open-source collections information management system used by five UC Berkeley museums, and other museums around the world.
In his new role, John oversees systems operations and maintenance, collaborates with museum staff to address their collections management needs, and designs and develops web applications, reports, and other software related to CollectionSpace.
John shares responsibilities with Chris Hoffman, Research IT’s Informatics Service Manager, joining Chris on both the UC Berkeley CollectionSpace Governance Committee and the Research IT Service Leadership Group. John will also sit on the technical advisory committee within Lyrasis, the organizational home of CollectionSpace.
A part-time member of the CollectionSpace team since December 2011, John also holds a research appointment in the Department of Linguistics. His work on a variety of historical linguistics projects includes the recent publication of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (http://stedt.berkeley.edu) after 28 years of effort. John arrived in Berkeley in 1977, joining UC's Office of the President as a programmer on library projects; later he joined the Division of Library Automation as a principal member of the team that developed the Melvyl online library catalog. John holds an M.L.I.S and PhD in linguistics, both from UC Berkeley.