[PDADC-L] Appointment of Mr. Larry Alford as Chief Librarian

PDAD&C#54, 2010-11

To: Librarians and Staff, University of Toronto Libraries
PDAD&C

From: Cheryl Misak, Vice-President and Provost

Date: February 15, 2011

Re: Appointment of Mr. Larry Alford as Chief Librarian

I am extremely pleased to announce that the Agenda Committee of the Academic Board has approved the appointment of Mr. Larry P. Alford as Chief Librarian effective no later than August 1, 2011 and ending June 30, 2018.

Larry Alford is internationally recognized as a leader in library science, first at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then at Temple University, where he has been Vice Provost for Libraries and University Librarian since 2005 and Dean of University Libraries since 2007. In this position, he was responsible for a library system that includes the five libraries of the Paley library system, the Ginsburg Health Sciences Library, and the Podiatric Medicine Library and also for the Temple University Press which publishes approximately 60 scholarly monographs per year.

His engagement in numerous library operations, including the development of print and electronic collections, library services, and the renovation and building of libraries, has resulted in a superb vision for research libraries in the 21st Century. He has a lengthy and successful record of leadership in cooperative activities among libraries, first in North Carolina and then nationally and globally, culminating in his chairing for the last four years the Board of Trustees of OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), a global library cooperative that serves 72,000 libraries. He is passionate about libraries as partners in research and learning and over the last six years he has been leading a transformation of the libraries at Temple.

Mr. Alford, who holds a B.A. and M.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been a member of the American Library Association (ALA) and has served as chair of the ALA Directors of Large Research Libraries Discussion Group. From 2004 -2006 he served as chair of the Collection Management and Development Section of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services and from 2005-2009 as an elected member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Steering Committee. He is a member of the Association of Research Libraries Special Collections Working Group and the ARL Committee on Statistics.

Please join me in welcoming Mr. Alford to the University of Toronto.