Chris Bourg, who has served as director of the MIT Libraries since 2015, has been named vice provost and Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) Director of the Libraries, MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan announced today.

“The title ‘vice provost’ signals the enduring importance of the MIT Libraries in the digital age,” said Chandrakasan. “While the ways in which the libraries meet the needs of our community might change as technology changes, their mission of protecting access to knowledge and information is as vital as ever.”

Thanks to a generous gift from Barbara K. Ostrom ’78, SM ’78, the position of the director of the libraries now has an endowment to help fund it in perpetuity. Bourg noted that the gift is especially meaningful for her, due to the sense of service she shares with Ostrom: they both completed Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) during their time as undergraduates — Bourg at Duke University and Ostrom at MIT — before going on to active military service.

“Barbara’s gift is an incredible acknowledgment of the progress the entire MIT Libraries staff has made toward our vision,” said Bourg, who noted that Ostrom had also supported an MIT Libraries initiative to highlight MIT’s women faculty by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible their personal archives. “Her generosity advances the libraries’ ability to support teaching, learning, and community-building at MIT well into the future.”

During her tenure, Bourg has emphasized digital access to content, a more open and equitable scholarly publishing landscape, and expanded support for data-intensive and computational research.

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