University / Marc Bourcier
Western University has appointed Geoffrey Robert Little as vice-provost and chief librarian of Western Libraries for a five-year term beginning July 22, 2024. Little comes to Western from Concordia University, where he has held a series of leadership roles, including his current position as associate university librarian for scholarly communication.
At Concordia, Little played a pivotal role in creating and launching Concordia University Press, a nonprofit open-access scholarly publisher. During his tenure, Concordia also developed a multi-phase digital preservation service, expanded its open educational resources (OER) program, and implemented the ORCID system, which gives researchers a unique consistent identifier, connected to all their scholarly work.
Little worked in the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario as research and correspondence coordinator before earning his master of library and information science from the University of Toronto. He spent three years working at Yale University as library communications coordinator and contributing to the library’s collection development, instruction, and advancement programs, before joining Concordia in 2010. He earned a second graduate degree in history from Concordia in 2015 and for several years he taught a graduate course on the history of books and printing at McGill University’s School of Information Studies.
At Western, Little succeeds Catherine Steeves, who has served as vice-provost and chief librarian since 2014.
For more information see the Western University news release.
