Iris Buunk

Congratulations to (almost Dr) Iris Buunk on her appointment as a Community Engagement and Communications Officer at the Ligue des bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche/Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER). This good news comes within days of Iris’ submission of the corrected version of her PhD thesis, which was examined at the end of March this year.

LIBER was founded in the Hague in 1971 to help university, national and special libraries support world-class research. It is a partner organisation in many European projects that promote open science. The main focus of Iris‘ new role at LIBER is responsibility for activities related to European projects and general LIBER communications.

Iris is particularly well-placed to undertake the work on fostering community development and the building of stakeholder networks, not least because nurturing communities of practice and facilitating knowledge sharing in networks are prominent themes of her doctoral thesis Social media as facilitators of tacit knowledge sharing practices amongst public sector employees. As a qualified librarian with experience of working on the kind of projects that LIBER supports, Iris also has an excellent understanding of the context in which LIBER and the members of the its wider network operate.

In the first instance Iris has signed a temporary contract with LIBER until the end of 2020, with the possibility of a further extension into 2021 (depending on a range of factors, including funding). Iris starts her new job next week on Monday 15th June 2020.