Chris Bourg, who has served as director of the MIT Libraries since 2015, has been named vice provost and Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) Director of the Libraries, MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan announced today.
“The title ‘vice provost’ signals the enduring importance of the MIT Libraries in the digital age,” said Chandrakasan. “While the ways in which the libraries meet the needs of our community might change as technology changes, their mission of protecting access to knowledge and information is as vital as ever.”
Thanks to a generous gift from Barbara K. Ostrom ’78, SM ’78, the position of the director of the libraries now has an endowment to help fund it in perpetuity. Bourg noted that the gift is especially meaningful for her, due to the sense of service she shares with Ostrom: they both completed Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) during their time as undergraduates — Bourg at Duke University and Ostrom at MIT — before going on to active military service.
“Barbara’s gift is an incredible acknowledgment of the progress the entire MIT Libraries staff has made toward our vision,” said Bourg, who noted that Ostrom had also supported an MIT Libraries initiative to highlight MIT’s women faculty by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible their personal archives. “Her generosity advances the libraries’ ability to support teaching, learning, and community-building at MIT well into the future.”
During her tenure, Bourg has emphasized digital access to content, a more open and equitable scholarly publishing landscape, and expanded support for data-intensive and computational research. She has helped both the libraries and the Institute adapt to AI-driven changes: she co-chaired the Working Group on Scholarly Content and Generative AI, charged with helping the MIT community navigate the legal, technical, and ethical issues involved when scholarly content is used to develop and train generative AI models. And she was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, which issued its final report in August.
Promoting open scholarship has been a longstanding focus of Bourg’s career. In 2018, the libraries launched the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, with Bourg serving as founding director. She co-chaired the 2017 MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research; its recommendations led to the creation of the MIT Prize for Open Data, co-sponsored by the School of Science, and the development of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. Guided by the framework, MIT became one of the first major U.S. institutions to cancel a journals contract with Elsevier in 2020, standing by its open scholarship principles while saving the Institute millions of dollars.
Bourg co-chaired the 2016 Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries and has guided the MIT Libraries toward the vision laid out by the task force report. Under her leadership, the libraries completed a major renovation of Hayden Library and the Building 14 Courtyard and launched MIT Reads, an Institute-wide reading and discussion program designed to foster empathy and belonging within the MIT community.
Prior to joining MIT, Bourg worked for 12 years in the Stanford University Libraries. Before Stanford, she spent 10 years as an active-duty U.S. Army officer, including three years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She received a BA from Duke, an MA from the University of Maryland, and an MA and PhD in sociology from Stanford.
Bourg is a member of the board of the Center for Open Science, the external advisory board of the Stanford Data Science Institute’s Center for Open and Reproducible Science, and the board of Annual Reviews, a premier publisher of open review journals in 51 disciplines. She also currently serves on the national academies of Science and Engineering, and the Medicine Corrections and Retractions Committee, tasked with upgrading the scientific record.