Library Board Selects Executive Director

The members of the newly established governing board of the University library system announced Monday that Helen Shenton, current deputy director of the Harvard University Library and former member of the leadership team of the British Library, will serve as the first Harvard Library executive director.

In her new capacity on the Harvard Library Board, Shenton will lead an ongoing centralization effort to facilitate greater coordination among the University’s traditionally autonomous school libraries.

Shenton came to Harvard this past fall after serving as head of collection care for the British Library, one of the largest research libraries in the world.

“Helen believes strongly, as do I, that academic libraries must not only collect and preserve materials and offer expert guidance to students and faculty alike, but must also be engines of innovation in this exciting time of change,” Provost Steven E. Hyman said in a statement to the Harvard Gazette.

As deputy director of HUL, Shenton served as a member of the Library Implementation Work Group, which acted upon the proposals submitted in Nov. 2009 by the Task Force on University Libraries.

Shenton will now look to coordinate the 73 library units within the Harvard library system, the world’s largest University library system.

The current system affords each school autonomy over its individual collection, resulting in a lack of a cohesive structure across the entire library system, according to Chair of the Harvard Library Implementation Work Group David C. Lamberth, a professor at the Divinity School.

The establishment of the Harvard Library Board was the first major overhaul in what Lamberth described as a long-term process to coordinate the disparate library units.

The members of the eleven-person board, named Dec. 10 by University President Drew G. Faust, are professors and administrators from throughout the University.

The board selected Shenton in its first official meeting. She could not be reached for comment for this article.

“I am honored to accept this role at a transformative time for the world’s greatest university library,” Shenton told the Gazette.

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.