Barbara Ostrom Makes Landmark Gift to the Libraries

Generous support creates an endowment to sustain the Libraries’ leadership and innovation

By MIT Libraries on November 3, 2026

Barbara OstromA generous gift from Barbara Ostrom ‘78 SM ’78 has created an endowment to support the MIT Libraries’ director and the highest priorities of the organization. This landmark gift comes as Provost Anantha Chandrakasan recently announced that Chris Bourg has been named a vice provost, an acknowledgment of the enduring importance of the Libraries to the Institute’s mission. Bourg, who has led the MIT Libraries since 2015, is the inaugural Vice Provost and Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) Director of the Libraries.

“Information management has never been more crucial,” says Ostrom. “The Libraries directors I have met have been forward looking, innovative, and not afraid of change. I wholly support that mindset and think the individual overseeing the MIT Libraries system should receive the same level of support as any faculty member.”

Ostrom’s gift, the largest individual gift in the Libraries’ history, will enable the organization to continue to innovate, responding to the new and evolving ways the community accesses library resources. She is particularly inspired by the Libraries’ continually expanding efforts to go beyond print – collecting and providing access to digital content, code, data, and even oral histories. “Curating the digital world is important to make information widely available to anyone who needs it,” she says.

Ostrom’s previous support of MIT includes a gift to establish the Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) Bioinformatics and Computing Facility at the Koch Institute and a gift to help launch the Women@MIT Archival Initiative in 2016. A champion of education, she is particularly interested in ways to support students beyond the classroom.

“Barbara’s gift is a testament to the importance and impact of the extraordinary work that the Libraries’ staff does to advance knowledge and serve our community,” says Bourg.

Ostrom is no stranger to the work it takes to run a library. She started working in her school library in the third grade, when “they needed some place to put me to keep me occupied rather than fidgeting in class,” she says, then continued throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school. At MIT, she spent time in the military science library in the old Building 20. As part of ROTC, she had a part-time job organizing what she calls “a miscellaneous collection of uncatalogued materials,” getting help from staff at Hayden Library to put together a card catalog and inventory.

Today, Ostrom wants to shine a light on the Libraries’ ability to fulfill a diverse range of needs within the MIT community. “Some people are curious to expand their personal knowledge, and others have a problem set due tomorrow,” she says. The Libraries are here for them both, and thanks to Ostrom’s philanthropy, will evolve to keep meeting those needs well into the future.