Karen Smith-Yoshimura, who so many in our community know from her work at the Research Libraries Group and then at OCLC, has announced she is retiring at the end of this month.

Karen has done amazing things during her career. I'm particularly grateful for her low-profile but absolutely essential work that ultimately led to Unicode; this is vision and leadership at its very best. Thank you for that, and for so much else you've done, including your more recent work on linked data, Karen.

And of course Karen has written a much better summary of her accomplishments that I could possibly compose. It's absolutely worth reading, and it's here:

With all best wishes for her retirement.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI