Princeton Prof to Lead Library

Robert C. Darnton ’60, a Princeton historian specializing in 18th-century France, has been chosen to lead the Harvard University Library, Provost Steven E. Hyman announced yesterday afternoon.

Darnton will replace long-time library director Sidney Verba ’53 on July 1 and assume Verba’s post as the Pforzheimer University professor. Verba announced his intention to retire in September after leading the University Library for 23 years. The university librarian position is traditionally held by a senior faculty member at Harvard.

Darnton, 68, will return to his alma mater after teaching at Princeton for nearly 40 years. He spent his undergraduate years in Adams House and later served as a junior fellow on the Society of Fellows.

Darnton, a scholar in the “history of the book,” said in an interview yesterday that the prospect of taking over the largest university library system in the world was “daunting—quite a responsibility.”

“It’s also a great opportunity,” he added, “because I can marry my interest in books—communication systems in general—with the needs of the present and even the future.”

“Professor Darnton seemed born for this position,” Hyman, who chaired the advisory committee for the search, wrote in an e-mailed statement yesterday. “He is a profound scholar, a historian and lover of the book, who is also quite at home with bits and bytes.”

Darnton will take the helm at a time when digital collections—including Google’s book-scanning project—are playing an ever-growing role in the University’s holdings.

As a professor, Darnton has embraced online media. Among other projects, he is helping to create an online archive of the correspondence between four of the Enlightenment’s greatest thinkers, and is writing a book that he plans to release both in print and digitally.

“The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn’t mean I’m not concerned with the 21st,” Darnton said.

Darnton said that the Google book-scanning project is a “messy, but very, very promising subject.”

Google’s initiative has been mired in lawsuits from copyright holders, though Harvard is only scanning works that are in the public domain.

Darnton, a trustee of the New York Public Library, cited the rising costs of books and digital holdings as one of the greatest challenges facing the University Library as he takes charge.

“We have to improve the budget for all the libraries in the system. That message has been heard by the administration,” Darnton said. “I’m optimistic, but I’m not underestimating the difficulties.”

Hyman said that he and President-elect Drew G. Faust will study the library budgets, work with Darnton to identify needs and funding sources, and raise money from donors. Darnton said that he expects to get plenty of support from faculty members as well.

“There’s a lot of goodwill out there,” he said. “The faculty cares, and so they will scream bloody murder when they feel their library is slipping, and they should. I’m here to be screamed at.”

As an outsider, Darnton will be faced with an unusually delicate administrative task. Each of the individual faculties of Harvard funds its own library, while the University Library is a department of the central administration. Darnton will need to bring together a decentralized set of Harvard libraries over which he does not exert direct budgetary authority.

While he acknowledged the “tremendous advantages” to coordinating libraries across campus, he said he had no plans to further centralize the system.

“My job is to coordinate—it’s also a diplomatic job,” he said. “It’s important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.”

Although Darnton is considered the chief steward of Harvard’s library collections, his department’s budget is significantly smaller than the Harvard College Library (HCL), the library of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). According to the annual report from 2004-2005, the most recent available, the University Library’s budget was $16.1 million while HCL’s budget was $72.7 million.

Hyman led the six-month long search for a new library director with the help of an advisory group composed of nine faculty members, two librarians, and Lawrence M. Levine, the chief information officer for FAS.

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Laurence H. M. Holland can be reached at lholland@fas.harvard.