Mercedes Rose Photography
UCLA has selected Athena N. Jackson as the Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian, beginning March 1, 2024. Jackson, no stranger to the UCLA community, previously served as the director of special collections before her current tenure as dean of libraries at the University of Houston, where she holds the Elizabeth D. Rockwell Chair.
During Jackson’s leadership at the University of Houston, she encouraged collaboration across the university, ensuring that the university libraries were inclusive spaces that championed learning and creativity among all users.
During her first stint at UCLA, Jackson served on the library’s management team, with responsibilities of shaping the future of the campus’s special collections and archives. She also fostered innovative practices related to preservation and conservation of material objects and digital records, and incorporated the use of digital tools and methods to enhance the delivery of library collections.
Jackson previously served as the Pennsylvania State University’s Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair and head of the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, and as associate director of special collections at the University of Michigan’s Special Collections Library. She also worked as a special collections librarian at the University of Miami, as the education and outreach librarian and project manager for the Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project at Louisiana State University, and as coordinator of the North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Project and an archivist at the North Carolina State Archives.
Jackson is an active member of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and has served on the ARL Statistics Survey Revision Task Force 2022–2023, Nominating Committee 2022, Research and Analytics Committee 2021–2023, and Kaleidoscope Program Task Force 2020, along with her service in other organizations.
At UCLA, Jackson succeeds Virginia “Ginny” Steel, who retired at the end of 2023 after leading the UCLA Library since 2013.
For more information visit UCLA’s press release and University of Houston’s press release
