Kris Kasianovitz

Job title: 
Library Director
Department: 
Institute of Governmental Studies
Bio/CV: 

Kris comes to IGS from the Stanford University Libraries where she was the Government Information Librarian for State, Local and International Documents and managed the Social Sciences Resources Group from 2017-2021. Prior to Stanford, Kris was the State and Local Government Information and Non-governmental Information Librarian at UCLA’s Young Research Library from 2001-2011. She received her M.S.L.I.S. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science in 2002, and was the recipient of the Jane B. and Robert B. Downs Professional Promise Award. 

Kris’ role as a government information librarian involves collecting materials for state, local and international jurisdictions and providing research and instruction support in the use of these collections to academic departments, research centers, and general public. A fair amount of her work involves finding solutions for born digital collection development and preservation, providing curatorial support for large digitization projects, data acquisition and management, web archiving, as well as policy issues, like copyright of state and local information. 

Kris has extensive experience working with Decennial Census and American Community Survey data, state and local legislative and regulatory processes, and civic engagement issues. She is involved in web archiving of state and local government information, notably the CA.govBay Area Governments  and Student and Youth Environmental Activism Web Archives. And with over twenty years in the library profession working with government information, she is helping to give back to the profession and future librarians by teaching a course on Government Information Sources at San Jose State University’s iSchool.

In addition to overseeing all of the operations of the IGSL, Kris is leading a new state-funded initiative, in collaboration with the California State Library, to digitize California local government documents and develop an online database with these materials that is easily accessible to policymakers and the general public.

Role: