Brigitte Weinsteiger has been appointed the interim director of the Penn Libraries. She will also continue to serve as the Penn Libraries Gershwind & Bennett Family Senior Associate Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications, a role she has held since Sept. 2022.
Weinsteiger has served in multiple leadership positions since she joined the Penn Libraries staff in 2008. As senior associate vice provost, she directs the Libraries’ academic and community engagement services; collection strategy; acquisitions, access, and licensing; the preservation, conservation, and exhibits programs; and library counsel and scholarly communications. In addition, she oversees the Penn Libraries’ 10 departmental libraries, directing personnel, facilities, access services, and operations at these locations across campus. She leads a team of 115 staff, in addition to hundreds of student employees and interns, and has direct oversight of the Libraries’ information budget of $27 million.
Among the priorities Weinsteiger has championed at Penn is the preservation of global scholarship and cultural heritage, endeavoring to increase the diversity and inclusiveness of the Libraries’ collections and engagement with the Penn and Philadelphia communities. She launched the Diversity in the Stacks initiative and, most recently, instituted the new Center for Global Collections. Weinsteiger has also advanced, both locally and nationally, sustainable models for scholarly communications and partnered with Penn faculty and publishers on long-term, mutually viable solutions to expanding access to scholarly literature while sustaining a healthy publishing enterprise. In support of these and other Libraries’ priorities, Weinsteiger plays a critical role in building and growing endowments for the Libraries’ deep and distinctive collections, ensuring a strategic match between scholarly content needs and the resources necessary to address them.
Weinsteiger assumed the role of interim director of the Penn Libraries on Sept. 13, 2023. Constantia Constantinou, who was appointed H. Carton Rogers III Vice Provost and director of the Penn Libraries in Aug. 2018, recently stepped down from the role for personal family reasons.
“I am truly honored by this opportunity to lead our talented Penn Libraries staff during this interim period,” says Weinsteiger. “They work with unwavering dedication, every day, to inspire learning and fuel the creation of knowledge—and to build dynamic resources, tools, and expertise to meet the evolving needs of the Penn community.”
Weinsteiger holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts from the University of Pennsylvania (2013) and a Master of Library and Information Science from Drexel University (2009).
This story originally appears in Penn Libraries.
