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University Librarian
University Librarian Thomas C. Leonard has published several books on the role of the press in society and the origins of modern American journalism, including The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting and News for All: America's Coming-of-Age with the Press. He is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism, where he also served as associate dean for more than a decade.
As University Librarian, Leonard manages Doe, Moffitt, Bancroft, and East Asian Libraries, as well as 15 subject specialty libraries. The library system includes over 11 million volumes, 134 thousand serials, 9 million pictorial images, and 80 thousand manuscripts.
Since assuming his position in 2001, he has overseen the building of the new Jean Grey Hargrove Music Library, the new C. V. Starr East Asian Library, and the renovation of the Bancroft Library.
After earning a 1973 Ph.D. in history from Berkeley, Leonard taught American history at Columbia University. He joined the faculty at the School of Journalism in 1976. At Berkeley, he has chaired the Academic Freedom and the Library Committees of the Academic Senate, as well as co-chaired the Digital Library Advisory Committee.
He is the author of dozens of magazine articles and reference book essays on politics, history and the media, and has served as a consultant for projects at the Library of Congress and numerous other organizations. He recently served as president of the Association of Research Libraries, an organization of more than a hundred leading institutions in North America.
The whole Leonard family makes broad use of libraries: his wife was a psychologist at UC San Francisco; his daughter is on the faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno, in Animal Behavior; and his son is a newly minted Ph.D. and the Associate Director for Humanities Research Computing at the University of Chicago.
December 2011
