Biography

John M. Meador, Jr. is the Inaugural Dean of Libraries and Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (2014- ). Previously,he was Dean of Libraries at Binghamton University, State University of New York (2003-2014); Dean of Libraries and Professor at the University of Mississippi (1993-2003); Dean of Library Services, Professor & Head of the Library Science Department at Missouri State University (1984-1993); Assistant Director for Public Services at the University of Utah Libraries (1980-1984); and held a series of progressively more responsible positions at the University of Houston Libraries (1973-1980), culminating as Head of General Reference and tenured Associate Professor. He is internationally recognized as a library innovator and change agent, especially in the realms of information technology and organizational development. While dean at MSU, John automated the library with its first online catalog (NOTIS), introduced the first public computing lab on campus, developed the Bibliographer's Workstation, and opened a library store selling Apple Computer products to the campus. At Ole Miss, he installed a second generation integrated library system (Innovative Interface), completed a $15 million library expansion, acquired several distinguished special collections - including the papers of James Meredith and the multi-million dollar library of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants - and increased the library endowment from $1.5 to $13.5 million. Under his leadership, Binghamton introduced three information commons, value-added single search across multiple collections, and North America's first academic library installation of the Rosetta digital preservation system (Ex Libris) that is being used there as the foundation for a digital library. Recently, he was lured to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to merge and integrate their academic and health sciences libraries. In the past five years, John has given invited presentations at the University of Hong Kong (twice); Beijing Normal University; The National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts; ETH Zurich (twice); The University of Manchester; Universitaets-und Landesbibliothek Duesseldorf; KTH in Stockholm; and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In 2013, he was the keynote speaker for the Society for Academic Library,Library Society of China's annual conference held in Changchun.