Greg Eow, associate director for collections, has been appointed president of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). CRL is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries that supports original research and inspired teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Eow will begin in this new position in August 2019.

Since joining the MIT Libraries in 2015, Eow has restructured the MIT Libraries Collections directorate to advance the vision of the MIT Future of Libraries Task Force, creating the departments of Scholarly Communications and Collections Strategy and Acquisitions and Appraisal. He also worked to strengthen the relationships between the Libraries and the MIT Museum and MIT Press, partnering with the latter to experiment with models to support open access publishing.

“Greg has reshaped the Collections directorate and helped position the MIT Libraries to influence the scholarly communications landscape, all in pursuit of our goal to democratize access to information and the fruits of research,” says Chris Bourg, director of MIT Libraries. “CRL has made an outstanding choice, and I’m excited to see how Greg’s strategic leadership will advance both CRL and the shared aims of the larger research libraries community.”

As president of CRL, Eow will provide vision and leadership for the development of collective action among its members and with other institutions and consortia to preserve endangered and difficult-to-acquire materials, develop robust shared collection preservation strategies, and expand the corpus of digital research material.

“It has been an enormous privilege to work at MIT Libraries over the past four years,” says Eow. “It was a rare opportunity to think together with a brilliant community about some of the biggest issues facing libraries and archives. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to continue this critically important work at CRL.”

Before joining the MIT Libraries, Eow previously held appointments at the Harvard Library, Yale University Library, and Fondren Library, Rice University. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Rice University, an M.L.I.S. from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.A. from Hendrix College and is a member of the American Historical Association, the Grolier Club, and the Society of American Archivists.