February 16, 2020

Dear Colleagues,

I am excited to announce that Dr. Alicia M. Salaz will become the UO’s new Vice Provost and University Librarian, overseeing the five locations at our Eugene campus and the branches at UO Portland and the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. Currently, Alicia is the associate dean for Research and Academic Services and a senior librarian for Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. She will join our institution on June 21, 2021, taking over the leadership reins from Mark Watson, who has served in an interim leadership role since June 2019.

UO Libraries is a core strength of the university, serving as an essential partner in our educational, teaching, research, and public service mission. Alicia will bolster our already outstanding team at UO Libraries, who provide critical resources, programs, and other services to students, faculty, staff, and the community. She also plays key roles in her current job around the arena of data science, diversity and equity, and innovation, which all mesh quite well with the work we are already doing here at UO in those areas.

Alicia has been in her current role at Carnegie Mellon since 2018, leading the library’s research and academic services division, along with the access services division. As a member of the library’s leadership team, she oversees faculty mentoring, organizational development, and vision and strategy. She also leads the development of the institution’s service portfolio, along with handling professional and scholarly engagement.

Under her leadership, the CMU has experienced growth in the library’s research and academic services to campus, particularly in the development of partnerships with scholars and research centers across disciplines. With this strategic focus in mind, she invested in the acquisition and licensing of computational tools, digital infrastructure, expert consulting, and conducted the outreach necessary to accelerate the work of researchers, creators, and innovators across campus.

Alicia also guided the launch of a number of new academic services, including research metrics services and evidence synthesis services. She led the library’s subject specialist selectors through a full, data-driven collections review, and she collaborated with Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Technology Transfer and its entrepreneurship centers to connect campus entrepreneurs with consulting support. And she played a crucial role in developing library faculty and staff as full partners in the academic enterprise – up to and including teaching credit courses and serving as principal investigators.

She brings a long-standing and deep-seated interest in issues of equity, serving on the Carnegie Mellon provost’s committee to establish the first-ever Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She also developed faculty recruitment policy and procedure at the library to codify best practices for equitable recruitment and hiring, and revised the library collection development policy and educational and instructional strategy to explicitly address equity goals.

Before taking on her current role, Alicia was a senior librarian and information scientist at Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Doha, Qatar. During that time, she served as chair of the Information Literacy Network’s Board of Directors in the Gulf Region. She also spent five years as faculty librarian for Higher Colleges of Technology in the United Arab Emirates, developing, funding, and implementing information literacy and community-wide library programming for 16 higher-education campuses and 20,000 students.

She is a native Oregonian with strong ties to the state, having grown up in Northeast Portland. She graduated from Portland State University with a bachelor of arts before receiving a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Washington. She also has a doctor of education with an emphasis on higher education from the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

Thank you to all the UO Libraries faculty and staff, as well as numerous other members of the university community, who provided critical input on the search. I am eager for Alicia to join our team. I also want to thank Mark Watson for his steady leadership of UO Libraries. He has handled a broad gamut of challenges, including the pandemic response and the covering of two controversial murals, with deftness and grace and has remained a firm voice for the future and important role of the library within the UO as a whole. Mark will continue in his interim role until Alicia starts in June.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at provost@uoregon.edu.

Sincerely,

Patrick Phillips
Provost and Senior Vice President