Yale University Library News

E.C. Schroeder reappointed as Director of the Beinecke Library for another 5 years

January 20, 2016

Yale President, Peter Salovey announced today the reappointment of Edwin (E.C.) Schroeder, director of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and associate university librarian, to a second term through June 30, 2021.

As the Beinecke’s director, E.C. holds responsibility for using the library’s resources and collections to introduce faculty, students, and the broader Yale and New Haven communities to many of the university’s unique treasures. There is no doubt that in his first five years in the post E.C. has excelled in this charge. Early on, he made it his goal to have every undergraduate visit the Beinecke during his or her four years at Yale, and in the past five years the number of classes held there has risen from 200 to more than 500 annually. The establishment of the Windham Campbell Literature Prizes has, under E.C.’s stewardship, contributed to Yale’s standing as an internationally recognized showcase for emerging literary achievement. E.C. has opened wide the Beinecke’s doors to wider audiences from our region and beyond, hosting tours during New Haven’s Festival of Arts & Ideas and offering the building’s exterior as a canvas for the arts in an exhibit, “Lux: Ideas Through Light,” held last April. And he has taken the Beinecke’s renovation—a project he inherited from his predecessor that is now under way—as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink nearly every aspect of the library and its work, including the expansion of teaching spaces as one of his principal goals.
 
In the time since his initial appointment, E.C. has overseen the Beinecke’s acquisition of a number of truly outstanding collections: the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection, one of the largest private collections of 19th-century American photography devoted to Lincoln and the Civil War; the Anthony J. Taussig Collection, widely considered the world’s most important private collection of rare materials relating to English law; the Toshiyuki Takamiya Collection, the most comprehensive privately-owned collection of Middle English texts; archives of the renowned playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel; and the papers of award-winning children’s author Mo Willems.