February 18, 2008
Library dean Ron Dow retires
Ron Dow
katie.perry@rochester.edu
When Ron Dow walked into Rush Rhees Library over
11 years ago, he saw crumbling floors, chairs hemorrhaging their seat
stuffing, and banks of fluorescent lights hanging where chandeliers used to
be.
Many students kept their distance from the tired, old
building unless they needed a quiet place to study for finals, says Dow,
the first Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries.
While it was at the physical center of a campus being revitalized by a new
administrative strategy called the Renaissance Plan, it was far from the
hearts of students.
“At the time we needed to secure a position for
the library in this new educational mission, but we had a very worn out
place to do this in,” Dow says. “Rush Rhees the building
didn’t do justice to the significance of the content of the
stacks.”
Today the library is a bustling campus hub, much of it
restored to its original resplendence and some of it refashioned to meet
the changing needs of students. As Dow prepares to retire March 1, he looks
at how the library has changed and considers his work done.
In his time as dean, Dow spearheaded renovations to
the Martin E. Messinger Periodical Reading Room, the reference department,
the Gamble Room, Rare Books, the Welles-Brown Room, the Great Hall, the
Roger B. Friedlander Lobby, and most of the staff space. The
Hawkins-Carlson Room and the Gleason Library, a $5 million interactive
study area, were also created out of underutilized sections in the library.
Dow also directed the building of programs and
collections designed specifically for the students––especially
undergraduates––and faculty at the University. He focused the
library’s acquisitions on the coursework happening on campus and the
research interests of the University’s faculty. All of the changes he
led were made with the ultimate goal of bringing students back to the
library.
“We renovated the library not to make it
beautiful, but to make it a place for students,” he says.
But it wasn’t his vision alone that got him
hired. Charles Phelps, the University’s provost from 1994 to 2007 who
recruited Dow, says it was his entrepreneurial spirit that gave him an
edge.
“When he came in, he said to me ‘The
library needs a lot of work,’ and I felt my heart sink because I
knew he was going to ask for a lot of money, but before he finished his
sentence he said, ‘I’m not going to ask you for money, just a
development officer,’ and I said ‘Cool, here’s a guy
I’d like to work with,’” Phelps says.
Dow transformed the library in several ways beyond
physical renovations, Phelps says. Dow recognized the motivation, talent,
and expertise in his staff and encouraged them to share those qualities
with students and faculty through increased interaction. He afforded
the library staff the opportunity to take risks and in return they built a
library that now enjoys a campus and nation-wide reputation for innovation
and service.
During his tenure Dow and his staff reintegrated the
library into campus life by re-assessing the role it could play. Under his
lead, Susan Gibbons, who will succeed Dow as dean, started an initiative
that employs an anthropologist and anthropological methods to study the way
students use the library’s physical and technological resources in
their research.
On the digital forefront, Dow directed the transition
to the Voyager online catalog in the late 1990s, making the University one
of the first research libraries in the country to use that system. Since
then, Gibbons and other staff members have created a variety of software
and technological developments meant to make data navigation and storage
easier.
Among them are UR Research, an institutional
repository developed for faculty, researchers, and graduate student users;
and CoURse Resources, a database of major library resources and course
offerings that generates a collection of links to the best print and
electronic library resources for any course. Many of the
libraries’ newest innovations are now being sponsored by two separate
grants from the Mellon Foundation and another from IMLS.
Thomas Jackson, the University president from 1994 to
2005, says part of the Renaissance Plan was the revitalization of the
student residential experience and Dow saw that the library was a central
part of that. But beyond that, Jackson says, Dow used his years as dean to
forge a meaningful connection between the library and academic life at the
University.
“He didn’t see it as a separate fiefdom by
itself, but as an integral part of what it means to get an
education,” Jackson says.
“Dow recognized the motivation, talent, and
expertise in his staff and librarians and encouraged them to share those
qualities with students and faculty through increased
interaction.”
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