News & Events

Patricia Steele today announced her intention to leave Indiana University to become dean of university libraries at the University of Maryland. She begins her new position on Sept. 1.

Steele, who has served IU as the Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries since 2005, is widely admired for her leadership and vision and for moving libraries forward at a time when they are extending their mission to meet the demands of the digital age.

Recognized for positioning the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries to anticipate emergent priorities, Dean Steele has been particularly successful in building partnerships to support the research and learning needs of the of the academic community. Working with University Information Technology Services and other campus departments, she has grown IUScholarWorks to foster the dissemination of scholarship and has developed plans for a Research Commons to meet the changing expectations of faculty and graduate students.

Representing the university in the national library community, Dean Steele currently serves on the team to renegotiate an agreement between Google and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), which first entered into a partnership in 2007. She is a co-founder and executive committee member of HathiTrust, a shared digital library of the nation’s leading research libraries.

Her association with the IU Libraries spans many decades, beginning in the early 1960s when she was a student assistant in the Biology Library. “I have had the joy of being part of one of the most exciting libraries in the country at one of the premier universities,” she wrote to her colleagues. “The friendships and the working relationships I have enjoyed will be part of my life always. Any successes I have had can be attributed to the library team as a whole and to our many partnerships.”