McDaniels will lead Juniata’s efforts to renovate and expand Beeghly Library and integrate the College’s planned Learning Commons into the operation of the Library and other areas. In so doing, she will work with the College’s faculty to ensure library resources serve Juniata’s curriculum and support the educational enterprise for all in the College community.
“Lisa McDaniels has extensive experience in libraries, academic and career resources, and a commitment to student learning, all of which make her the ideal candidate to expand and help reimagine our own library,” says Lauren Bowen, Juniata’s provost. “She understands the modern library and ways in which to retain its purpose as the academic hub of campus while adapting to the contemporary learner. She has a strategic vision and a demonstrated commitment to work collaboratively with all constituencies in this important work.”
“Some people question the relevance or need for libraries or librarians in a digital age. I would answer that academic libraries are on the cusp of a major transformation—not a dead-end but a new beginning that integrates pedagogy, technology, and design into a whole-campus intellectual hub,” says McDaniels, who led a team of five librarians specializing in research and instruction across the three libraries on Colby College’s Waterville, Maine campus. “The chance to work with the faculty, staff, and students at Juniata to reimagine Beeghly Library is an extraordinary, once-in-a-career opportunity. It will require us to ‘think about who we are’ and who we want to become, as an engaged, interdisciplinary community where print and digital learning tools bring students into the scholarly conversation with faculty.”
McDaniels initiated Colby’s Personal Librarian Program, where librarians connected with all first- and second-year students. McDaniels has extensive higher education experience in college and university libraries as well as in academic services. Prior to her work at Colby, she served as director of the library and learning commons at Southern Maine Community College, in South Portland, Maine, from 2012 to 2014. She also served as assistant dean of libraries at the University of Maine at Augusta from 2010 to 2012.
She began her higher education library career at the University of Iowa, where she was a reference and instruction librarian from 2005 to 2010 and was head of the math and physics libraries from 2005 to 2008. In addition, she worked at public libraries in Florida from 1998 to 2003 and then spent almost a year working in Anchorage, Alaska at the Alaska Resources Library Information Services cataloging technical documents related to the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
“Some people question the relevance or need for libraries or librarians in a digital age. I would answer that academic libraries are on the cusp of a major transformation— not a dead-end, but a new beginning that integrates pedagogy, technology and design into a whole-campus intellectual hub.”Lisa McDaniels, dean of the library
She earned a bachelor’s degree in business and economics in 1981 from Bridgewater College and went on to earn a master’s degree in counseling psychology in 1991 from James Madison University. She earned a master’s degree in library science in 1998 from Florida State University, in Tallahassee, Fla.
