New college librarian appointed

Marta Brunner, head of Collections, Research, and Instructional Services in the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA, has been named the new college librarian at Skidmore College, replacing Ruth Copans, who will retire this year.

The appointment of Brunner followed a national search. She will join the Skidmore community in July, according to an announcement by Beau Breslin, dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs. Said Breslin, “I am delighted to announce Marta’s appointment. With over a decade of experience, she brings to Skidmore a profound knowledge of libraries, a deep passion for liberal education, and a keen understanding of the centrality of libraries in today’s colleges and universities. We could not be more fortunate.”

“I am excited to join such a vibrant, engaged community,” says Brunner. “I am a product of a liberal arts college education so this feels like a homecoming of sorts, especially since Skidmore's assertion that Creative Thought Matters resonates with me personally. It will be a privilege to lead the Scribner Library team.” 

Brunner will head Skidmore’s Lucy Scribner Library, a facility that houses nearly 400,000 print volumes, has 24 full and part-time faculty and staff, and an estimated budget of $3.6 million  She will report to Breslin and work closely with the library faculty and staff, teaching faculty, and academic support services to develop information polices, resources, and services in support of the mission of the college.

At UCLA Library, where Brunner has worked since 2006, she led the department responsible for building collections and offering research and instructional services related to the humanities, social sciences, and area studies. She also served as a research librarian for a variety of subjects including comparative literature, digital humanities, English and American literature, the history of science, philosophy, and U.S. and British history. During her tenure, she has been involved in major projects including a multi-million-dollar renovation, a long-term study of graduate student research needs, significant budget realignments in the wake of the recent economic recession, and several innovative librarian recruitments.

She began her UCLA career as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) postdoctoral fellow in scholarly information resources. Before joining the UCLA community, Brunner was on the staff of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

Outside of UCLA, Brunner has continued to be actively engaged with CLIR’s postdoctoral fellowship program. She has been invited to speak on a variety of library topics at conferences in the United States and Canada. In addition, she has been active in open access and scholarly communication initiatives and is a strategic advisor for the Open Humanities Press.  She comes with a great deal of teaching experience, having taught college-level English and history courses since 1997 and English as a second language classes since 1990.

Brunner holds a B.A. degree in English with a minor in teaching English as a second language from Goshen College and a master’s degree in English from the University of Arizona. She earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.