New Vice President for Harvard Library

Sarah Thomas of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries named to new post.

Sarah Thomas

Amid continuing leadership changes at the Harvard Library during a period of major reorganization, Provost Alan Garber announced on May 20 that Sarah Thomas, who currently directs the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, will be shifting her office to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August. Thomas has been named vice president for the Harvard Library, a new position with overall responsibility for the institution. She will report to Garber; her responsibilities will include those held by Mary Lee Kennedy, formerly senior associate provost for the Harvard Library, who left in May to become chief library officer at the New York Public Library.

Thomas, who was named Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford in 2007, was the first woman, and the first non-British citizen, to hold that position in more than four centuries. (In the same year, she won the Dewey Medal from the American Library Association for “creative leadership of high order.”) Previously, she was Cornell’s University Librarian; during her tenure, that library won the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Excellence in Academic Libraries Award (2002). Thomas has also worked at the Library of Congress, where she established the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, and at the National Agricultural Library, the Research Libraries Group, and (in the early 1970s) at Widener Library.

Raised in Massachusetts, she graduated from Smith College in 1970, earned a master’s in library science from Simmons College in 1973, and a Ph.D. in German literature from Johns Hopkins in 1983. Her publications include “The Bod Squad,” in Transforming The Bodleian (2012); “The Encouragement of Learning,” in Copyright in the Digital Age (2010); “Publishing Solutions for Contemporary Scholars,” in Library HiTech (2010); and “Advancing Scholarship Through Library Collaboration,” in Die Innovative Bibliothek: Elmar Mittler zum 65. Geburtstag (2005). She has served on the Harvard Overseers’ visiting committee for the University Library and is currently a member of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Board, the Research Libraries UK Board, and the Smith College President’s Council, among other professional and community undertakings.

Helen Shenton, executive director of the Harvard Library, who will report to the new vice president, says, “Sarah's rich and deep experience in major research libraries in the U.S. and the U.K. will be an enormous benefit to the Harvard Library as it enters the next phase of its evolution.” 

You might also like

Harvard Adopts Reforms as Higher Ed Turmoil Continues

University creates new “interfaith engagement” role; Columbia, Brown settle with the government.

Remembering Tom Lehrer

The mathematician and satirist kept Harvard in his thoughts—and lyrics.

International Scholars and Students Targeted—Again

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announces fresh investigation into Harvard’s participation in the Exchange Visitor Program.

Most popular

The Professor Who Quantified Democracy

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

“Do You Find That Reasonable?” Harvard Undergraduates Discuss a Changing University

A student panel grapples—civilly—with shifting policies and differing opinions.

FAS Dean Outlines Preparations for Loss of Federal Funding

“To preserve our mission, we must act now,” Hoekstra says at faculty meeting

Explore More From Current Issue

An illustration of a green leaf being hit by a beam of light and bouncing off the leaf and then becoming a color prisim

Light-based analysis of botanical collections link plants to Earth’s changing climate.

A six-foot-tall, five-panel folded screen stands in a field of grass next to the woods. It's painted different shades of green, with some squares cut out that represent digital pixels.

Julia Rooney’s paintings cross the analog-digital divide.

Illustration of a math students gathering, 1936, in Annanberg Hall, Memorial Hall

Including profundity and pretzels