About Robert H. McDonald

Robert H. McDonald is Senior Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries in Austin. A passionate advocate for libraries and their role in an informed society, he 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.

His research and expertise in academic libraries, and within higher education more broadly, spans areas such as digital preservation and digital collections, learning eco-systems, scaled online learning, lean and agile frameworks in public management, and large-scale data infrastructure. He is active professionally in national and international organizations including Educause, UPCEA and the Association of Research Libraries.

In addition to his extensive publishing record, over the course of his career, McDonald has been the recipient of millions of dollars in grant funding from the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Sloan Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and other bodies. He currently holds an appointment as Professor of Practice in the School of Information at UT Austin.

Previous to his tenure at UT Austin, he served in leadership roles at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Indiana University Bloomington, the University of California San Diego and Florida State University. He is a proud alumnus of the University of South Carolina (Library Science) and the University of Georgia (Music). In his spare time he loves to hike and play music.