Ken Frazier has been the Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library System since 1992 and a member of the UW-Madison library staff since 1978. He received his master's degree in librarianship from the University of Denver and his undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Kansas.

He is the past-president and a member of the board of directors of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Currently he chairs an ARL committee charged with the responsibility to develop a national digitization strategy to provide open access to all federal documents via the Internet.

He is the founder of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), which is an ARL-sponsored initiative that advocates reducing the cost of research information by promoting competition and technical innovation in scholarly publishing.

In July 2000, he was the recipient of the Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award from the American Library Association for "leadership and risk-taking" in the development of new approaches to the crisis in scholarly communication.

Under Ken's leadership, the UW System libraries have created one of the nation's most extensive digital library collections. Very recently, the UW-Madison Library has begun to use this digital library infrastructure to support digital publishing of university research and scholarship by establishing the Office of Scholarly Communications and Publishing.