The following is a message to the York University community from President and Vice-Chancellor Rhonda L. Lenton:
I am pleased to inform the York community that, following a consultation process with York University Libraries (YUL) staff, Joy Kirchner has accepted the invitation of the provost and myself to undertake a second five-year term as dean of libraries, commencing July 1, 2020. On Oct. 7, the Board of Governors concurred with our recommendation and approved the renewal.
Kirchner has provided outstanding leadership throughout her first term. She has led an important restructuring of the Libraries in order to position them for the future and enable them to better support the University’s teaching and research activities. Some of her notable achievements include: the development of a Student Learning & Academic Success Department to support the inclusion of skills development in course curricula through curricular review and enhancement; the revisioning of the Learning Commons; and the creation of a Research & Open Scholarship division in YUL. She has also advanced a number of key initiatives at the University and across the profession, such as open access, digital literacy, development of an institutional Research Commons, support for Indigeneity and Markham Centre Campus planning.
Kirchner has brought to York University a breadth and depth of library experience and perspective gained from positions in university libraries in Canada and the U.S. over the past 20 years. She joined York in 2015 from the University of Minnesota Libraries in Minneapolis, where she held the position of associate university librarian for content and collections and interim associate university librarian for research and learning. Her responsibilities included oversight of acquisitions, collection development, open scholarship and the development of digital scholarship services.
Prior to the University of Minnesota, Kirchner held several increasingly senior positions at the University of British Columbia (UBC), most recently as the head of the UBC Scholarly Communications & Copyright Office, where she established service models for digital scholarship, scholarly communications and copyright services. In that role, she was also responsible for campus-wide discussions and education in relation to these issues. Previously, she worked at Columbia University in New York City, where she pioneered the development of infrastructure to support new electronic journals and databases.
Kirchner’s research and professional collaborations with colleagues in the U.S. and Canada have focused on developing mechanisms for cross-institutional print stewardship programs, defining critical success factors in establishing Centres of Excellence for information services, investigating new models of digital scholarship, and instigating a robust slate of scholarly communications and open-access campus outreach programs for institutions across North America. Additionally, she was former Chair of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Advancing Research Committee, where she advanced several open access and open education infrastructure supports for Canadian institutions. She has also served on a joint Canadian Association of Research Libraries/Canadian Research Knowledge Network task group to examine national open access policies that involved consultation with the Tri-Council research funders. She currently serves as executive Chair of the Ontario University Council of University Libraries and has been elected to serve on the prestigious Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition based in Washington.
I would like to thank the members of the community for their contributions to the reappointment process.
I look forward to working with Joy Kirchner as she continues to bring leadership to this important role. I hope that all members of the York University community will join me in congratulating her.