Chris Bourg, who has led the MIT Libraries since 2015, has been appointed vice provost and Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) director of the libraries. MIT provost Anantha Chandrakasan announced the appointment, noting that the vice provost title underscores the library’s enduring importance in the digital age. Chandrakasan stressed that while technology may change how libraries serve the community, the mission of protecting access to knowledge remains vital.
A generous gift from Barbara K. Ostrom ’78, SM ’78 created an endowment for the director position. Bourg said the gift is especially meaningful because both she and Ostrom completed ROTC as undergraduates before active military service. Ostrom’s support also funded a library initiative to acquire, preserve, and make accessible personal archives of MIT women faculty.
During her tenure, Bourg has emphasized digital access, an 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, helping the MIT community navigate legal, technical, and ethical issues when scholarly content is used to train generative AI models, and served on the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, which released its final report in August.
Promoting open scholarship has been a long‑standing focus of Bourg’s career. 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, leading to the MIT Prize for Open Data 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 journal contract with Elsevier in 2020, upholding open scholarship principles while saving millions of dollars.
Bourg also co‑chaired the 2016 Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries, steering the libraries toward the vision outlined in the report. Under her leadership, the major renovation of Hayden Library and Building 14 courtyard was completed, and MIT Reads, an institute‑wide reading and discussion program, was launched to foster empathy and belonging.
Before joining MIT, Bourg spent 12 years at Stanford University Libraries, and prior to that served 10 years as an active‑duty U.S. Army officer, including three years teaching 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. Bourg 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. She also participates in the National Academies of Science and Engineering and the Medicine Corrections and Retractions Committee, working to improve the scientific record.
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