About Robert H. McDonald

Robert H. McDonald is the Senior Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries and a Professor of Practice in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He has served in leadership roles for research libraries in Texas, Colorado, Indiana and Florida and has been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Sloan Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. McDonald is a passionate advocate for libraries and their roles in an informed society.

Robert H. McDonald is Senior Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries and Professor of Practice in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. SVP McDonald leads the Austin campus library system in fulfilling their mission to advance teaching, catalyze research, and democratize learning in order to develop critical thinkers and global citizens.

McDonald is a passionate advocate for libraries and their roles in an informed society. His research and expertise focuses on learning eco-systems, scaled online learning, lean and agile frameworks in public management, digital preservation, and large scale data infrastructure. He is active professionally with a number of national and international organizations including Educause, UPCEA and the Association of Research Libraries.

Robert H. McDonald is the Senior Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries and a Professor of Practice in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He has served in leadership roles for research libraries in Texas, Colorado, Indiana and Florida and has been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Sloan Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. McDonald has authored, co-authored or edited over 40 journal articles and book chapters and has served as principal investigator on over $6 million dollars of competitively awarded research as well as serving as a researcher on numerous projects.

McDonald began his career in research libraries as a liaison librarian (law, constitutional law, and english literature) and started working early in areas of web discovery, digital collections and digital preservation. During his career McDonald has served as a principle investigator on projects that have developed open source software such as the Kuali Open Library Environment (now FOLIO Library Services Platform), The HathiTrust Digital Library, the HathiTrust Research Center, and on Learning Management System projects such as Sakai and Apereo. He has been an active participant in the founding of the Chronopolis Project, the Digital Preservation Network (DPN), Unizin, and in the Mellon Funded Project Bamboo.

From 2018-2025 McDonald was the Dean of University Libraries and Senior Vice Provost of Online and Extended Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. In this position he helped develop six new online degree programs that leveraged stackable credentials and performance based admissions for scaled online learning. During this time, McDonald worked on several projects that supported the use of micro-credentials and badging and has been active in those communities since that time. McDonald has been a fellow of the ASU/Georgetown Innovative Leadership Academy and of the University of California Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education Executive Leadership Academy.

More recently McDonald has been working on new model learning methods to support library student workers both at the undergraduate and graduate level with collaborative educational partners both on and off campus.