Our staff - Portico

Kate Wittenberg

Kate brings to Portico a deep understanding of issues at the intersection of digital technologies, academic libraries, and scholarly publishing.

Previously, Kate served as project director of client and partnership development for Ithaka S+R, where her innovative work with libraries and publishers helped to develop resources, products, and services that enabled these communities to grow as vibrant digital organizations while remaining true to their core missions.

Kate spent most of her career at Columbia, where she was the editor-in-chief of Columbia University Press until 1999, and went on to found and direct EPIC (the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) for the university. EPIC was a pioneering initiative in digital publishing, and a model publishing partnership for libraries, presses, and academic IT departments.

Rebecca Seger

Vice President, Institutional Participation and Strategic Partnerships
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Rebecca joined ITHAKA in 2019 and is responsible for developing our global outreach strategy and leading our team of 40 professionals dedicated to growing and managing our network of more than 11,000 library partners in 170 countries.

Rebecca has worked with libraries throughout her 30-year publishing career. From 2000-2019, she worked for Oxford University Press in various roles, most recently as Senior Director, Institutional Sales, for North and South America. During her tenure there, she focused on product development, sales and marketing of e-books, databases and journals, and building relationships with the library community. She was part of the teams that developed University Press Scholarship Online, Oxford Reference Online, and Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

Prior to joining OUP, she held positions at McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, and HarperCollins. She is a past chair of the AAP/ALCTS Joint Publisher/Librarian Committee and speaks often at industry events, including the Charleston Conference, American Library Association, ACRL, NFAIS, ER&L, and the Association of American Publishers/PSP Division seminars.

Karen Hanson

Lead Research Developer
[email protected]

Karen’s role is to identify current and emerging technology issues relevant to Portico’s operations and mission, as well as to discover, evaluate, develop, and implement tools to enhance preservation services at ITHAKA. As part of this role, she works with partners at other institutions to complete grant-funded research on preservation.

Karen previously worked as part of the Digital Research and Curation Center team at Johns Hopkins University Libraries and has over 15 years of application development experience. She also holds a Masters in Library and Information Science from Rutgers University and worked for 5 years as the Knowledge Systems Librarian at NYU Health Sciences Libraries, where she specialized in digital archives and research data management services.

Sandra Parr

Senior Manager for Publisher Relations
[email protected]

Sandra has worked in the EdTech market for over 20 years. From 2014-2019, Sandra was Senior Director of Licensing and Business Development at Cengage Gale. From 2004 to 2014 she worked at ProQuest as a Global Content Alliance Manager. During her tenure at both companies, she managed publishers across the globe and licensed content to create database products in Business, Social Sciences, Science and Technology, Health and Medicine, History and Literature and The Arts. Sandra is fluent in Spanish, English & French and has worked extensively in Europe & Latin America.

Dongqing Xie

Software Engineer
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Dongqing is responsible for analyzing the completeness of Portico’s journal and book preservation holdings. She develops and maintains a database and applications to monitor current preservation content and predict missing content. She also supports other projects including the Constellate text-and-data analysis service, the library holdings comparison project, the file identifier evaluation project, and works with the Lead Research Developer to evaluate tools to enhance the preservation system.

Dongqing has over 20 years of software development experience. Prior to Ithaka, Dongqing worked at Documenting the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Florida Center for Library Automation at Florida State University. She holds a Masters of Arts in Computer and Information Science and Engineering from the University of Florida and a Masters in Computer Science and Engineering from Huazhong University of Technology and Science.

Amy J. Kirchhoff

Archive Service Product Manager
[email protected]

Amy J. Kirchhoff is responsible for creation and execution of archival policy and oversees operation and development of the Portico website.

Prior to her work at Portico, Amy was director of technology for JSTOR and also served as a member of the shared software development group at ITHAKA. She has published articles on Portico’s preservation methodology and policies in several publications, including most recently Learned Publishing and The Serials Librarian. She holds a Master of Arts in Library Science from the University of Arizona.