As the College Librarian for Arts and Science and John Louis Kesler Director of the Divinity Library at Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries, I oversee two of nine campus libraries, working closely with a collective staff of 15 FTE, as well as with the administration, faculty, and students of the Divinity School and the College of Arts and Science. As part of the Heard Libraries’ leadership team, I work with colleagues to articulate strategic principles and priorities, and develop library-wide policies. In addition to my responsibilities at Vanderbilt, I am an Adjunct Instructor at the School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I teach the Academic Library course.
My research interests include American religious historiography, disciplinary information literacy, strategic planning and mission alignment, methods in digital humanities, and exploring how data visualization can be leveraged for analysis in academic librarianship. In addition to reviews and encyclopedia entries (including the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science), I have also contributed chapters to Debates in Digital Humanities 2019 (Minnesota), The Grounded Instruction Librarian (ACRL), Personalizing the Pandemic (Atla Open) AI and Academic Libraries (ACRL, forthcoming), in addition to being the editor for the volume Information Literacy & Theological Librarianship: Theory & Praxis (Atla Open).
Bobby Smiley 