ITHAKA is pleased to announce that Kate Wittenberg has been appointed the new Managing Director of Portico, effective September 1. Eileen Fenton, who successfully led Portico since its founding in 2002, will work closely with Kate over the coming weeks as Kate transitions fully into her new role and concludes projects for Ithaka S+R. Eileen will continue in her role as ITHAKA’s Executive Vice President of Technology & Content Services.
Kate brings a deep understanding of issues at the intersection of digital technologies, academic libraries, and scholarly publishing to Portico. During her time as Project Director, Client and Partnership Development for Ithaka S+R, Kate’s 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.
Portico has become an integral part of the scholarly communications ecosystem by providing certified digital preservation services to more than 700 libraries around the world and 2,000 scholarly societies that work with more than 120 publishers. We are confident that Kate is well positioned to engage with publishers, libraries, and others to build upon this important foundation and to ensure that Portico’s work continues to evolve. Her dedication to our community and her keen sense of the changing academic landscape will prove invaluable as we work together to preserve scholarship.