Elaine Tennant Selected to Head UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library

Elaine Tennant, a medieval and early modern specialist in the German and Scandinavian departments at the University of California, Berkeley, will become the James D. Hart Director of UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library starting in September, according to a university press release.

Tennant said she hopes to help integrate The Bancroft more fully into the campus's teaching and research missions and wants the library to take an active role in the ongoing discussion of the nature of information and the future of libraries in the 21^st century.

"Collections of material artifacts like those held by The Bancroft present special challenges and have a particular contribution to make to our thinking about information in an increasingly virtual environment," Tennant said in the press release. "Figuring out what the relationship is between old and new technologies, and among multiple forms of knowing, is the kind of thing that Berkeley's great at."

Tennant will take over from Charles Faulhaber who had held the post since 1995, and she will be the first woman to direct The Bancroft in its 151-year history.

Tennant, who did her graduate work at Harvard University and the University of Vienna, joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1977. She served several times as chair of the Scandinavian Department and for nearly a decade on the UC Berkeley Academic Senate Library Committee.

The Bancroft is home to important primary sources on the history of California and the American West, as well as to the Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, contemporary literary collections, the Free Speech Movement Archive, rare books and manuscripts and more. In 2009, The Bancroft reopened on campus following a three-year, $64 million seismic retrofit and reconstruction financed jointly by the state and more than 700 private donors.

"It's a point of pride with me not to let the classes I teach leave Berkeley without having had a chance to learn something about The Bancroft collections," Tennant said. "The Bancroft Library is one of the most dynamic teaching centers on the Berkeley campus."