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Memorial: Sidney Verba, 1932–2019

Sidney Verba photo
Sid Verba, image courtesy of Harvard University

Sidney Verba, director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007 and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor Emeritus, died on March 4, 2019, at age 86.

Verba led the Harvard University Library into the digital age, moving the catalog online and making many of the collections open to the world. He was also a founding member of the Commission on Preservation and Access, which worked with the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a strategy for and to oversee massive microfilming projects in US research libraries in the 1980s and 1990s. Verba was Harvard’s representative in the Association of Research Libraries from 1984 through 1992.

For more information about his life and career, see the March 7 Harvard Gazette article, “Sidney Verba Dies at 86” and the March 13 New York Times article “Sidney Verba, Innovative Scholar of Democracies, Dies at 86.”

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