SUBJECT:

Retirement of University Librarian Brian E. C. Schottlaender

Following eighteen years of extraordinary service as UC San Diego’s University Librarian, and fifteen years at the UCLA Library, Brian E. C. Schottlaender has announced his plans to retire effective June 30, 2017.

UL Schottlaender has been an effective and highly respected leader for the UC San Diego Library, and he will be deeply missed. He is nationally recognized in his field and has led several collaborative initiatives to advance digitization and digital preservation on the UC system-wide, national and global scales. During his tenure at UC San Diego, print and digital offerings in our Library expanded by more than 50% and the number of collection endowments doubled. Under UL Schottlaender’s transformational leadership, the UC San Diego Library has become recognized as one of the top academic libraries in the nation.

UL Schottlaender has consistently exhibited bold and visionary leadership in navigating the evolving role of the academic library and in reshaping Library resources and services to best meet the changing needs of our academic community. Under UL Schottlaender’s leadership, the Library recently launched the Geisel Library Revitalization Initiative with a generous gift from longtime friend and supporter Audrey Geisel, with the goal of renovating the interior public spaces of the Geisel Library to meet the needs of today's students and scholars. In response to the growing demand for cyberinfrastructure, UL Schottlaender collaborated with SDSC, Calit2 and other campus partners to build our technological and human capacity to manage and curate the vast amount of digital data generated by UC San Diego faculty and researchers. Today, the Library plays an increasingly critical role in managing and curating research data, rendering it discoverable by scholars and the public.

UL Schottlaender served as lead curator of the Online Archive of California (OAC), an early effort to make library special collections and archives accessible online. He was also instrumental in developing the HathiTrust initiative, a consortium of universities led by UC and the University of Michigan, which has become one of the largest online collections of books supporting scholarly work, ever assembled. He was an inaugural member of the Board of the Digital Preservation Network, and led UC San Diego Library’s partnership with Google to build a global digital library. He was also instrumental to the development of the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), a groundbreaking shared print journal repository serving university and research libraries. Now in its seventh year with 74 partner libraries, WEST has become a model for other library consortia. UL Schottlaender also guided the development of the Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance, an international consortium of more than 35 major Pacific Rim academic libraries. Recently, the Library entered into collaboration agreements with Chinese and German universities.

In 2007, UL Schottlaender was named The Audrey Geisel University Librarian, an honor bestowed by another generous gift from Audrey Geisel. UL Schottlaender has also been the recipient of some of the American Library Association’s (ALA) most prestigious awards, including the Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award in 2015 and the Melvil Dewey Medal in 2010, for his bold approach to addressing the challenges and opportunities facing libraries and universities in the digital age.

We thank UL Schottlaender for his transformational contributions to our University and wish him all the best in his retirement. Associate University Librarian for Enterprise Services, Tammy Nickelson Dearie, will serve as Interim University Librarian while a national search is conducted for UL Schottlaender’s successor.

Pradeep K. Khosla Chancellor Peter F. Cowhey Interim Executive Vice Chancellor