Skidmore appoints new head librarian

SARATOGA SPRINGS >> Marta Brunner, head of collections, research and instructional services in the Charles E. Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has been named the new college librarian at Skidmore College, replacing Ruth Copans, who will retire this year.

The appointment of Brunner follows a national search. She will join the Skidmore community in July, according to an announcement by Beau Breslin, dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs.

“I am delighted to announce Marta’s appointment,” he said. “With more than a decade of experience, she brings to Skidmore a profound knowledge of libraries, a deep passion for liberal education, and a keen understanding of the centrality of libraries in today’s colleges and universities. We could not be more fortunate.”

Brunner said she was excited to join such a vibrant, engaged college community.

“I am a product of a liberal arts college education, so this feels like a homecoming of sorts, especially since Skidmore’s assertion that ‘Creative Thought Matters’ resonates with me personally,” she said. “It will be a privilege to lead the Scribner Library team.”

Brunner will head Skidmore’s Lucy Scribner Library, a facility that houses nearly 400,000 print volumes, has 24 full- and part-time faculty and staff, and has an estimated budget of $3.6 million. She will report to Breslin and work closely with the library faculty and staff, teaching faculty and academic support services to develop information policies, resources and services in support of the mission of the college.

At UCLA, where Brunner has worked since 2006, she led the department responsible for building library collections, and offering research and instructional services related to the humanities, social sciences and area studies. She also served as a research librarian for a variety of subjects including comparative literature, digital humanities, English and American literature, the history of science, philosophy, and United States and British history. During her tenure, she was involved in major projects including a multimillion-dollar renovation, a long-term study of graduate student research needs, significant budget realignments – in the wake of the recent economic recession – and several innovative librarian recruitments.

She began her UCLA career as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) postdoctoral fellow in scholarly information resources. Before joining the UCLA community, Brunner was on the staff of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

Outside of UCLA, Brunner has continued to be actively engaged with CLIR’s postdoctoral fellowship program. She has been invited to speak on a variety of library topics at conferences in the United States and Canada. In addition, she has been active in open-access and scholarly communication initiatives, and is a strategic advisor for the Open Humanities Press. She comes with a great deal of teaching experience, having taught college-level English and history courses since 1997, and English as a second language classes since 1990.

Brunner holds a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in teaching English as a second language from Goshen College in Indiana and a master’s degree in English from the University of Arizona. She earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.