Princeton's Robert Darnton To Succeed Verba as Harvard Library Director

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 5/25/2007

Harvard University this week announced that Robert Darnton, a professor of European history at Princeton University, and a "scholar of the book," will succeed Sidney Verba as Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library, effective July 1, 2007. Darnton’s appointment follows a six-month search for Verba’s successor, which included an advisory committee of 12 individuals, including nine faculty members from a range of disciplines as well as the librarians of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School and the university’s Chief Information Officer.

Verba was appointed director of the Harvard University Libraries by President Derek Bok in 1984, and will be recognized by Harvard with a $2.5 million library endowment fund in his name. "Both the duration and the significance of Sidney Verba’s tenure are without precedent," noted Frances Fergusson, president-elect of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, in a statement announcing the endowment. "His legacy to the Harvard libraries can be characterized by a sustained, expanded tradition of great collection-building, an unwavering concern for the needs of users, and a commitment to opening Harvard’s collections to the world." Under the terms that created the fund, Verba can designate the purpose of the new endowment fund.

Darnton, is an accomplished historian and scholar. An alumnus of Harvard College, he is a former Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, and Chevalier of France’s Légion D’Honneur, France’s highest honor. He also is an internationally recognized scholar on the history of the book and has a strong background in library issues, from preservation and access to publishing and technology. As president of the American Historical Society, he pioneered in 1999 the Gutenberg-e Prizes, an effort to blaze a new path for historical publishing on the web, concerns he has eloquently voiced in his writings. Darnton said he was "honored and awed" at taking the helm of Harvard’s libraries. "Having, as a historian, studied the world of books in the distant past, I now have an opportunity to do something for the cause of books and book learning in the present," he said. "I want to help find a way in which the new and the old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning."