February 13, 2024
Dear Members of Our Campus Community,
I write to share with you the news that University Librarian Kristin Antelman is planning to retire after the end of the current academic year.
We will move quickly to consult with our Academic Senate, faculty, administrative, and staff colleagues in order to form a search advisory committee to conduct a national search for our next University Librarian.
We are very grateful for the exemplary leadership Kristin has provided since joining our campus in 2018. She has demonstrated a deep commitment to serving our academic community, working with faculty, staff, and students to advance scholarship and research; expanding library collections, access, and services; and implementing new technologies.
We especially appreciate the strong leadership and guidance Kristin provided throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. During this challenging time, our Library discovered innovative ways to make resources, expertise, and services more easily accessible. This included providing access to primary source materials for research; scanning content for Course Reserves; purchasing and promoting electronic books; offering virtual instruction and research consultations; and much more.
These changes propelled our Library further into the digital world, ensuring support for student and faculty needs both locally and on national and international levels throughout the pandemic.
Beyond her contributions during the pandemic, Kristin has advanced our Library services in many ways. She implemented a strategic plan focusing the Library’s efforts on student academic success, increasing and improving student spaces in our Library, including a new Makerspace facility that opened this quarter. She also supported open science initiatives and enhanced Library expertise and capacity to support researchers and students in research data, digital scholarship, and data science tools. Kristin served on the systemwide UC libraries open access strategy team, whose work resulted in systemwide contracts with major publishers that enabled open access publishing for UC authors and had an international impact. Among other accomplishments, she also increased fundraising significantly, including a $5-million gift for a book arts collection and endowment. Next year, the Music Library collection will be integrated into the main library to create the Sara Miller McCune Arts Library.
Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall and I sincerely thank Kristin for her many outstanding contributions. She will always be a valued member of our UC Santa Barbara family. Please join us in wishing her well in all of her future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Henry T. Yang
Chancellor