Edward J. Valauskas
Edward J. Valauskas (born October 3, 1950) is an American librarian, educator, and editor-in-chief of the journal First Monday. He has taught at many institutions, including Emporia State University, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, the International Centre for Information Management Systems and Services; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; UC Berkeley Extension; the University of Chicago Graham School of General Studies; and the Regenstein School of the Chicago Botanic Garden. In 2016, he was elected Director-at-Large on the Board of Management of the International Centre for Information Management Systems and Services in Toruń.
Valauskas has worked in several libraries, such as those at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago, as well as special libraries at the MCL in Chicago; the SSC Laboratory in Texas; and the United Nations Office at Geneva. He most recently served as curator of rare books at the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden. He curated the traveling exhibit Plants in Print: The Age of Botanical Discovery. The exhibit opened on April 1, 2004 at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., and later appeared at the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Milton Hershey School Art Museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the Cherokee Garden Library at the Atlanta History Center, and the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio. He has used rare herbals from Lenhardt Library for lectures on Renaissance science as reflected in the Harry Potter series. These talks, titled "Harry Potter's Herbology," have been given at the Chicago Botanic Garden and elsewhere.
Valauskas is the founder and current editor-in-chief of First Monday. From September 2011 to December 2015, he wrote a monthly column, "Stories from the Rare Book Collection," about rare books in the Lenhardt Library; the column was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
He is the author or editor of several books on the Internet and computing, including The Internet for Teachers and School Media Specialists (with Monica Ertel; 1996), Internet Initiative: Libraries Providing Internet Services and How They Plan, Pay, and Manage (with Nancy R. John; 1995), Internet Troubleshooter: Help for the Logged-On and Lost (with Nancy R. John; 1994), and Macintoshed Libraries (with Bill Vaccaro; 1987–94, six editions). He has written numerous papers and articles for magazines and journals.
Valauskas collects paleontology books, especially those for young readers about dinosaurs. An exhibit titled The Boy Who Never Grew Up: Dinosaur Books & Realia from the Collection of Edward J. Valauskas opened at the University of Virginia in 1998. Many of these items were donated to Special Collections at the University of Chicago Library. Bibliosaurus! Dinosaurs in the Popular Imagination opened at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago from January 2 to April 19, 2024, based on materials from Edward’s collection and on items loaned by his brother, Charles Valauskas.
He has a deep interest in paleontology and aims to visit many Lagerstätten around the world. He has climbed to Cambrian Burgess Shale exposures in British Columbia, hunted fossils with his wife Nancy R. John in Solnhofen and Eichstätt in Germany, and as a youngster collected fossils at Mazon Creek in Illinois, as well as from Late Carboniferous sites at Pit 11, in Illinois; Late Cretaceous sites in the Coon Creek Formation in McNairy County, Tennessee; and around a Silurian reef in the Thornton Quarry in Thornton, Illinois.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 02:46 (CET).