Geffert applied for the position in May 2009 and received the job offer from College President Tony Marx in late October. He will take up the post on Jan. 21, 2010.
“Amherst’s collections are rightly celebrated, and it will be a privilege to oversee their curation,” Geffert said.
Members of the Amherst community were notified of the appointment on Nov. 23 in an e-mail from Dean of Faculty Gregory Call, which stated that Geffert was the “unanimous and enthusiastic choice of the search committee” of seven Amherst faculty members, students, librarians and library staff and the Director of Libraries at Smith College. Call remarked in the e-mail that he and Marx were “delighted to accept” the committee’s recommendation.
Professor of the History of Art and American Studies Carol Clark, the chair of the search committee, praised Geffert’s extensive experience in librarianship.
“He is an accomplished scholar and a seasoned administrator who is deeply knowledgeable about the challenges a college research library like Amherst’s faces,” Clark said in the e-mail.
Geffert’s qualifications include a Ph.D. in modern European history and an M.A. in modern Russian history from the University of Minnesota and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois, with a focus on research and reference. He received his B.A., summa cum laude, from St. Olaf College, where he served as an associate professor of Russian Area Studies, reference librarian for eight years and college librarian for seven prior to his move to West Point in 2008.
Geffert has published numerous articles, monographs and reviews in the areas of history and librarianship, and he speaks and reads Russian, and reads German and Modern Greek. Geffert is also active in the arts and athletics; he coaches youth soccer and West Point’s cross-country ski team, has 16 years of piano study and enjoys running marathons and triathlons.
Keith Pendergrass ’10, the student member of the search committee, said he is “confident that [Geffert] can provide the leadership that the library desperately needs.”
“[Geffert] had a great balance of past experience and vision for the future,” Pendergrass said. “His previous accomplishments suggest that he will be up to meeting the unique challenges of the head librarian position here at Amherst.”
Such challenges include “the seismic disruptions in publishing, particularly in the unsettled, crisis-driven world of scholarly publishing,” Geffert said. “In the midst of struggling academic presses, a crumbling fourth estate and fierce debates over what constitutes scholarship, the library should promote discussions across the College and in existing and still-to-be formed national organizations to promote scholarship in sustainable, ethical and technologically innovative ways. Amherst’s reputation, intellectual capital, remarkable human resources, its progressive commitments and the clout of the Five Colleges provide an enviable means to influence the development of academic publishing and new ways to disseminate scholarship.”
Pendergrass feels that “the most difficult policy decisions for [Geffert] will likely be in the area of collections management in light of the possibilities offered by digitization.”
“In this regard, he was eager to give added resources our Archives and Special Collections department in an effort to increase accessibility through digitization, though I am hopeful that he will first use these resources to process backlogged and unorganized materials to better serve the Amherst College community, who are the primary users of these collections,” Pendergrass said.
Geffert does plan to address the opportunities that technology advances provide.
“I hope to think anew about how we define ‘collections,’ an ever-more amorphous term that cannot be understood solely in terms of autonomous, physical holdings,” Geffert said. “Advances in digitization and artificial intelligence permit Amherst to distribute its collections across the ether — to trumpet its exceptional holdings and heritage while honoring its social commitments by freeing its material for use by scholars across the world, including those in third-world countries who lack Amherst’s resources.”
Geffert also hopes to bring about improvements in library research support for students.
“The library must teach students how to conduct research, but it attempts this alone at its peril: the challenge is to recruit and mentor energetic staff with solid, scholarly credentials who can work collaboratively with faculty to teach disciplinary research skills,” Geffert said. “If Amherst is to educate students to ‘seek, value and advance knowledge’ and to ‘engage the world around them’ (part of what makes Amherst so appealing) and if the library, according to its mission, is to ‘sharpen students’ intellects’ and encourage them to ‘question accepted ideas,’ then librarians must work with professors to teach said students to find, evaluate, jettison and synthesize information; draw conclusions from what they find and produce new theses and arguments.”
Pendergrass agrees that research support is an area on which the new College Librarian should focus.
“I would like to see him implement his plan of adding the Writing Center, the [Moss Quantitative Center] and an IT help desk to the current reference area so that students can have the full range of their often-overlapping questions about conducting research answered in one place,” Pendergrass said.
Geffert recognizes the importance of working closely with the IT department.
“With the transition to electronic books and journals [and] the development of open-access publishing, an endeavor in which Amherst and its library can wield significant influence, it will be essential for the library to cultivate a systematic partnership with IT,” Geffert said. “In important respects, librarians and IT professionals share a common mission: storing and disseminating information, designing tools to manipulate information and teaching students how to analyze and assess that information.”
The potential construction of a new library for the College opens up other significant possibilities for Geffert and the library community.
“The College’s hope to build a new library in the next decade presents a wonderful opportunity to think about the types of facilities students and faculty need to conduct research, study, relax and socialize,” Geffert said.
In the meantime, however, “with the plan for a new library currently on hold, it is critical that [Geffert] find a way to utilize the current space of Frost to better serve the students and faculty and to balance their demands for multiple types of study and social spaces,” Pendergrass said.