UAlbany Librarian's Honor a First for SUNY

Meredith Butler's title as distinguished recognizes years of work, she says

Reprinted with permission of the Times Union, Albany, N.Y.

By Alan Wechsler
Staff writer, Times Union

In a sign that university librarians are becoming as important as professors, the State University's Board of Trustees unanimously agreed recently to name what could be a first in the country.

Meredith Butler, director of the three libraries at the University at Albany, was offered the title of distinguished librarian during the board's meeting last month in New York City. She is the first person to be named to the position created by SUNY a few years ago.

The position is equivalent to the title of distinguished professor, a promotion usually given to a fully-tenured professor who has shown outstanding work. Four of these were appointments made last month, including two sociology professors at UAlbany.

"It's a promotion that recognizes a lifetime of accomplishment," Butler said.

That Butler was given the title shows the increasing emphasis the university system is placing on its research facilities. To run the State University's third-largest library, a $5 million-per-year operation with nearly two million books, requires more that familiarity with the Library of Congress Classification System. These days, with the advent of computer technology, the very definition of "library" is changing.

Butler, who currently earns $114,585, was nominated by UAlbany President Karen Hitchcock. In explaining her choice at the board meeting, she described Butler as a model librarian, and lauded her role in developing the new $26 million Science Library, which was opened last year after 10 years of work.

Butler, now 55, decided back in 1971 that she wanted to be a research librarian. At the time, out of 100 librarians at the nation's top 100 colleges, only a half-dozen or so were women.

"I knew that's what I wanted to do," she said, "and I set out to do it. I always knew I was a good administrator."

Butler came to the university in 1981, and was named director eight years later. She runs the buildings — the main university library, the so-called "new library" and the downtown Dewey Library — from a spacious office on the first floor. She is completely at ease using the language of higher education, throwing out terms like "paradigm" and "technology-intensive" in the same sentence.

One of here greatest challenges was also her most unique — the creation of an international conference in Washington D.C., on the "economics of information." The discussion drew librarians and archivists from around the world to talk about the rapidly-increasing cost of books and other materials, which could affect the future of compiling information.

"Every choice has become much more complex," Butler said. "Used to be when a faculty member wanted a book or journal, you bought that item, cataloged it and put it on the shelf. Now, every acquisition has to be researched."