While the Lafayette administration conducts a nationwide search for a new dean of libraries, Charlotte Nunes, director of Digital Scholarship Services (DSS), has stepped into the role in the interim.
Nunes earned her doctorate in English from the University of Texas at Austin. During this time, she worked in project management for archives in several capacities. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in academic libraries at Southwestern University with the Council on Library and Information Resources.
Since arriving at Lafayette in 2016, Nunes has worked in DSS, a team that helps faculty and students create digital research projects. In this role, she has provided support to a number of digital scholarship projects encompassing both Lafayette-specific endeavors and those in the greater Lehigh Valley community.
Two of such projects include the Queer Archives Project and the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium (LVEHC). The Queer Archives Project centers the past and present queer voices of Lafayete through oral history interviews and queer education. LVEHC catalogs and displays artifacts and narratives from the Lehigh Valley in the last fifty years.
Nunes feels that her time with DSS has provided valuable experience to help her in her role as the dean of libraries.
“My job as director of digital scholarship services has been great preparation for this role—it’s given me 6 years of experience with project management in academic libraries, including listening deeply to the needs and interests of students, faculty, and other campus community members, and then coordinating library staff and resources to meet those needs,” she wrote in an email.
As the interim dean of libraries, Nunes oversees the library’s day-to-day happenings. She also fosters communication between different units of the library, as well as between the libraries and other groups on campus.
Nunes is optimistic about her role and the new opportunities she will be able to help provide for students.
“I’m especially excited for the library’s capacity to offer distinctive opportunities for undergraduate engagement with libraries and archives,” she wrote.
Nunes hopes to expand existing library programs that help students gain research skills, including the Personalized Research Assistance (PRA) program, the DSS Summer Scholars Program and the library’s partnership with the Data Assistants program. The goal of these programs is to help students “build digital literacy, skills with data and professionalization experience in the field of libraries and archives,” Nunes wrote.
During her time in this position, Nunes also hopes to add new opportunities that will get more students involved in library projects, such as offering greater programmatic support for archives of student life and centering student leadership in preparing and mounting exhibits in the libraries.
Nunes, who will still serve as director of DSS during her time as dean, hopes a permanent dean of libraries will be found by next summer. Until then, she and other members of the library staff will work to decide how the libraries can best operate to effectively transition into new leadership.
“In the year to come, my colleagues at the library and I will give a lot of thought to what our ambitions are as a library and how we can organize ourselves to achieve these goals, so that we can communicate our ideas to the incoming dean,” she wrote.
