Chris Bourg named vice provost and Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) Director of the MIT Libraries

MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan announced that Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries since 2015, has been named vice provost and Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) Director of the Libraries. Chandrakasan said the vice provost title signals the libraries' enduring importance in the digital age, adding that while the ways the libraries meet community needs may change with technology, their mission of protecting access to knowledge and information remains vital.

A gift from Barbara K. Ostrom '78, SM '78 endows the director position, funding it in perpetuity. Bourg said the gift is especially meaningful because both she and Ostrom completed Reserve Officers' Training Corps during their undergraduate years — Bourg at Duke University, Ostrom at MIT — before active military service. Ostrom had also supported a libraries initiative to acquire, preserve and make accessible the personal archives of MIT's women faculty.

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 co-chaired the Working Group on Scholarly Content and Generative AI, which helps the MIT community navigate legal, technical and ethical issues when scholarly content is used to develop and train generative AI models, and served on the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, which issued its final report in August.

In 2018 the libraries launched the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, with Bourg as founding director. She co-chaired the 2017 MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT's Research, whose recommendations led to the MIT Prize for Open Data, co-sponsored by the School of Science, and the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. Guided by that framework, MIT became one of the first major U.S. institutions to cancel a journals contract with Elsevier in 2020, saving the Institute millions of dollars. She also co-chaired the 2016 Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries. 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.

Before MIT, Bourg spent 12 years in the Stanford University Libraries and 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 holds a BA from Duke, an MA from the University of Maryland, and an MA and PhD in sociology from Stanford. She serves on 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, and is on a National Academies consensus committee on corrections and retractions.

Why it matters: MIT's library leadership now carries the vice provost title and a permanent funding source, and Bourg's record of open-access and publisher-contract actions, including the 2020 Elsevier cancellation, indicates the direction of MIT's scholarly publishing and AI-content policies.