The search committee charged with finding a new vice provost and director of libraries expects to secure a candidate by the end of the semester, committee members say.
The committee, formed by the Office of the Provost, was organized last February after then-director Paul Mosher resigned in April of 2003. His resignation followed the discovery of roughly 2,000 images of child pornography on his office computer. Mosher pleaded guilty to related charges last October.
Annenberg School for Communication professor Joseph Turow is in charge of the 12-person committee, composed of faculty, staff and students.
Though the committee was formed last February, the search has only been active since the beginning of the school year.
"We really only got started in earnest in the beginning of last semester," Turow said. "We're working really hard to identify candidates."
Search committee member and German professor Liliane Weissberg noted that securing a nominee for the presidency was important to the search.
"You cannot hire a vice provost if the vice provost does not know who his superior is," she said.
The search committee members are looking for a candidate who can work to improve the library in the context of a rapidly and dramatically changing research world.
The candidate must "push further what has been in the process already -- to rethink the place of the library within the University," Weissberg said.
"One of the major challenges any library director is facing these days is the extraordinary increase in the cost of information," said Carton Rogers, who is currently serving as interim director.
The cost increase, he explained, is partly due to the "digital revolution."
While budgets remain "fairly static," libraries are at the same time forced to deal with "huge increases on the part of publishers -- easily 6, 7, 8 percent increases on a regular basis," Rogers said.
The director will be responsible for balancing digital innovation with improvement of the print collections in Penn's 15 libraries.
"We have a library collection that is perhaps not as large as that of other leading institutions," Weissberg said.
"The library needs to be strengthened both financially and also in its position as the center of the University," she added.
Fundraising is an important part of the position. Though the library needed to raise between $3 and $4 million per year in the past few years, Rogers noted that this figure was larger than normal due to the renovations of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center.
However, the search committee members and acting director are confident in the library's many strengths and their ability to attract the best possible candidate.
"The library is an incredibly important institution at Penn and is very well respected around the United States as one of the gems of university libraries," Turow said.
Turow and Weissberg cited the library staff as one of the many strengths that would appeal to a potential candidate.
"We've heard extremely favorable comments about the library staff in general within the University as well as from people outside the University," Turow said. "The person coming here would have a library culture which is extremely helpful [and] client-friendly."
"The excellent staff at the library deserves the very best," Weissberg said.
