The search for a new dean of the university’s libraries is in its final stages, as university administrators have narrowed down their prospects to three potential candidates to head the university’s struggling library system.
Whomever is chosen for the job will face the responsibility of rebuilding the university library system, which has fallen below those of our peer institutions amid a budget crunch. The final three candidates are scheduled to visit the university in April and May, university Provost Nariman Farvardin said.
All three candidates, who are from outside the university and the state, have experience managing library budgets that, administrators hope, will help them to set the university libraries back on track.
According to a library council report presented to the University Senate last semester, the library system is the smallest in terms of information amassed and has the fewest journal subscriptions when compared to those of our five peer institutions – University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UCLA.
Interim dean of libraries Desider Vikor, who was traveling and couldn’t be reached for comment for this story, has said that the shrinking availability of resources is primarily impacted by increasing costs of academic and research journals, paired with tightening university and state budgets.
“We have been trying to minimize and eliminate paper versions of journals and go online for financial reasons,” Vikor said last semester. “But the online option is not a cheap one. That’s a myth.”
Generally, Farvardin said the budget needs to be increased, staff may need to be reorganized and the library needs to become more creative and entrepreneurial when trying to incorporate information studies, which is a growing field.
But because of state budget cuts, the rising costs of research materials and a university-wide hiring freeze, the libraries have been forced to cut back on critical resources that officials have said could disable them in the future if no changes are made. In the past, administrators have talked about cutting academic journal subscriptions and cutting staff to make up for monetary disparity – limiting the available resources for students, faculty and researchers.
In the coming weeks, the university will play host to the three candidates – John Howard, the associate dean and associate university librarian at Arizona State University, Patricia Steele, the Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries at Indiana University in Bloomington and Larry Alford, the dean of university libraries at Temple University – in hopes of finding the best fit for the university.
Farvardin said all three of the candidates are “outstanding finalists” who will help the university craft a new library strategic plan, outlining what changes must be made to make the libraries more efficient. Because the candidate comes from outside the university, university President Dan Mote and the provost must approve the hire because of the hiring freeze, and the new dean will likely start in July, depending on how soon the selected candidate is able to relocate to the university.
Howard, who worked for 25 years in various faculty and library positions at Harvard University, specialized in generating support from donors to boost funds for new initiatives. Steele, who managed a $30 million budget at the University of Indiana, has worked with digitalization. She serves on the executive committee for HathiTrust, a shared repository for Google and other digital content. Alford advanced the Temple library system from No. 95 in 2004 to No. 29 in 2007, according to the Association of Research Libraries’ rankings.
Expanding the library to incorporate more digital media was one of the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Task Force, an independent body of eight university faculty members who evaluated the libraries’ future goals and direction earlier this year, Farvardin said.
Farvardin said he doesn’t plan to release the review until the new dean joins the university, but noted its findings were expected.
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