Libraries

New Dean for River Campus Libraries Named

Nationally recognized library leader Susan Gibbons follows user-friendly approach that was hallmark of Ronald Dow.

By Katie Perry

This spring, Susan Gibbons, a noted authority on library technologies, takes leadership of the River Campus Libraries, succeeding Ronald Dow as the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of the River Campus Libraries on March 1. Gibbons will also take the title of vice provost.

“Susan is the right person to lead the libraries into the 21st century,” President Joel Seligman said in announcing the appointment. “She is a national leader in assessing and improving the way students use libraries and research materials, and she enhanced that reputation through the design process that led to the creation of the Gleason Library. With that project, the library tapped our finest resource—our students—to create a collaborative study space of their own making.”

DEANSHIP: A noted authority on library technologies, Susan Gibbons has been a member of the libraries staff since 2000.

Gibbons was appointed associate dean for public service and collections development in 2004, and since then she and Dow have worked closely on a number of projects that renewed the relevance of the campus libraries in the face of the Internet and digitally formatted resources.

“The fact that the appointment is an internal promotion sends a clear message about the satisfaction of the University administration in the library,” says Gibbons, “and that they want us to keep doing the good work we have been doing.”

She will take the reins on Dow’s user-based philosophy. The Gleason Library—one of many renovations to Rush Rhees Library during Dow’s tenure—uses many elements of student designs, thanks to an initiative started under Gibbons and led by the library’s anthropologist, Nancy Fried Foster. Using several anthropological methods, the library staff studied the way students use the library’s physical and technological resources in their research. Those findings were used to change the library’s Web site, and the way librarians interact with students. Another anthropological study of graduate students is now under way.

“I want to make sure the library continues its efforts to be student- and faculty-centered,” Gibbons says, “and that we’re ready to meet the challenges of teaching and scholarship in the digital age.”

With her promotion comes a seat on the president’s cabinet, a position Gibbons says will provide her, as a representative of the River Campus Libraries, “an opportunity to be engaged in changes going on at the University at the very highest levels.”

Rising steadily through the ranks of the library since she was hired as a part-time employee in September 2000, Gibbons now travels internationally to speak to librarians and university administrators interested in the anthropological methods in use at the University and emerging library technologies.

Gibbons is the author of The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student: Making the Connections (2006) and coeditor of Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester (2007).

She received master’s degrees in library science and history from Indiana University at Bloomington in 1995, and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2002.

Katie Perry writes about the libraries for University Communications.