Lauris Olson
Librarian & Coordinator, Social Sciences Collections
As the Penn Libraries' social sciences bibliographer - now coordinator for social sciences collections - since 1998, Lauris is responsible for selecting books, journals, electronic resources, and other media supporting Penn research and instruction in sociology, economics, linguistics, criminology, communication, and related fields. Lauris is Penn's Official Representative to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and the contact person for the Penn Libraries' Pennsylvania State Data Center affiliate membership. Lauris coordinates collection development and management activities of subject librarians for anthropology & archaeology, business, education, gender, women's studies & sexuality, political science & international relations, psychology, and social policy & practice/social work. Lauris is also the Penn Libraries' African studies bibliographer. Lauris started at the Penn Libraries in 1991 as a Van Pelt Library reference librarian, but Lauris's presence at Penn began in 1975 as an undergraduate, earning BA and MA degrees in Anthropology here, alongside a Drexel library degree.
The Penn Libraries have become a founding member of Policy Commons, a new one-stop community platform for research from the world's leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, IGOs and NGOs.
Policy Commons, produced by Coherent Digital, provides almost 2.5 million fulltext think-tank publications, including policy reports, administrative documents, books, project and campaign documents, working papers and discussion papers, journal articles, press releases, briefs, and brochures. The platform archives lost or orphan content, with more than 30,000 publications from 350 defunct and inactive policy organizations available to Penn through our membership, which also brings selected unique content licensed from a dozen publishers.
The Policy Commons interface offers fulltext searching in addition to 3,400 topics tags and filters for document type, organization name and type, publication language, country of publication, and publication date. Policy Commons also provides a searchable database of more than 16,000 policy organizations worldwide.
The Penn Libraries founding membership permits Penn research centers the opportunity to add their research output to Policy Commons. We welcome the opportunity to share the capabilities Policy Commons offers.
