Robert Wedgeworth - Career

Career

Robert Wedgeworth served as University Librarian, Professor of Library Administration and Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UI) from November 1993 until August 20, 1999 when he retired from the University. The UI Library is the largest public university research library in the world and the third largest of all public and private university research libraries in North America after Harvard and Yale.

Prior to that Wedgeworth had been Dean of the School of Library Service, Columbia University from 1985-1992 and Executive Director of the American Library Association (ALA)from 1972-1985.

In 1962 the American Library Association selected Wedgeworth as one of 75 librarians to serve as staff for “Library 21,” a library of the future exhibit at the Seattle World’s Fair. This experience and additional data processing training at IBM led to his appointment as Assistant Chief Acquisitions Librarian at Brown University in July 1966, with a special assignment to introduce library automation to the Brown Libraries. From 1966 to 1969 he managed all domestic and foreign acquisitions of library materials at Brown while developing an automated acquisitions and fund accounting system. As a Council on Library Resources, Inc. Fellow he toured all of Western Europe studying the book trade during the summer of 1969.

Wedgeworth moved to the Graduate School of Library Service, Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey in the fall of 1969 to do advanced studies in librarianship and teach in the graduate program. He left Rutgers to become Executive Director of the American Library Association (ALA) in August 1972.

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