Three New Senior Consultants Join Maverick Publishing Specialists

Maverick Publishing Specialists Ltd, announced today the addition of three Senior Consultants to their worldwide team of industry experts. In addition to their industry experience and technical, analytical, and editorial skills, the new additions greatly strengthen the company’s ability to serve China and other countries in Asian markets.

Paul Evans, Senior Associate

Having just returned from China, Paul is a publishing veteran with nearly three decades in both Academic and B2B technology publishing covering multiple product and service types. He has worked for three of the top five, global academic publishers and alongside obvious general management and business leadership skills, his expertise covers all areas of publishing, sales and marketing, and external relations.

Paul was most recently Director with Nature Research for China (Springer Nature) and prior to that, Managing Director for SAGE Publications Asia Pacific. In a quarter of a century with RELX (Elsevier) he worked as Global Director of publishing for engineering and materials science, Senior VP Academic Relations, and set up Elsevier’s China office for science publishing. Paul has an MA (hons) from Oxford; a BSc (hons); and an MBA and PhD.

Sarah Waldram, Senior Affiliate Associate

Sarah is an accomplished project manager, having worked on numerous print and digital publishing initiatives, such as the launch of the award-winning Berg Fashion Library (now Bloomsbury Fashion Central) for Bloomsbury Publishing. Similarly, at Oxford University Press, she oversaw preparation of lexical datasets for technology company clients, bringing in multi-million-pound revenues. She has strong cross-functional, leadership, collaborative, and external partner management skills – alongside equally solid editorial, commissioning, XML technology, systems, and web operations experience. 

Sarah has a background in Chinese and is fluent in spoken/written Mandarin, having recently returned from Beijing, where she worked for Chinese publishing enterprises on digital project management, print book creation, and rights acquisition.

Michelle Urberg, Affiliate Associate, Metadata Expert

Michelle is a publishing professional and trained librarian, whose expertise encompasses end-to-end metadata standards use, creation, and conversion. She has conducted research studies to improve customer engagement with scholarly outputs in digital platforms and to assess the state of the field for digital scholarship and digital humanities. Her work focuses on addressing the customer need for better metadata in strategizing realistic solutions.

Before joining Maverick, Michelle was a metadata librarian for the ExLibris business unit of ProQuest. Her work encompassed metadata transformation at scale (including KBART and XML), MARC cataloging at scale, developing metadata creation workflows, and managing open access metadata across multiple platforms. Other recent projects have focused on two key gaps in streaming video content creation: identifying options for standard identifiers and enhancing metadata produced for access and discovery. Michelle holds a PhD in Music History from the University of Chicago and a MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois. She is an active in Metadata 2020 and ACRL, including participating in the ACRL Leadership Council. She is a member of the 2020 cohort of SSP Fellows.