MERLOT Awards: Service to MERLOT: 2006 Distinguished Service Award

The Distinguished Service Award is reserved as MERLOT’s highest honor.  The recipient of this award demonstrates the vision that brings MERLOT members together to create the MERLOT Community and our services.  Recipients of this award have exemplified, through their vision and leadership, the highest values MERLOT holds.  The recipients of this award are selected by the previous winners with consultation from MERLOT management. 

The recipient of the fourth annual Distinguished Service Award is David Ernst, Assistant Vice Chancellor and CIO for the California State University System.  David is the CSU leader who began shaping the system’s initiative called the “multimedia repository” in 1995 which became MERLOT.  It is through David’s leadership in the CSU, his delivery of consistent funding and political support, that MERLOT has had a strong environment to develop its capabilities and services which now reaches around the world.  Without his vision and leadership within the CSU, MERLOT would have become just another experiment that faded away a few years after it was started.  David has the lead member of the MERLOT Advisory Board since its inception and has provided critical strategic direction for MERLOT to keep in on a course of service and innovation.  As an internationally recognized leader in Information Technology, David has also been instrumental to bringing corporate and organizational partners into the MERLOT community.