Meet New Hampshire College Library Director Jennifer Gunter King

From the Hamphsire College web site:

There are clichés that tend to define the idea of a library: Unbreachable quiet that stretches through long, dark expanses of book stacks. The smell of old paper and dried ink. Quiet corners and carrels where solitary work plods slowly along.

Jennifer Gunter King, Hampshire College’s new director of the Harold F. Johnson Library, isn’t a huge fan of that vision. 

“The library today is in the process of evolving from a repository into a center that functions as a hub and gateway to all sorts of resources,” she said. “The library director position in a place like Hampshire, which already embraces a philosophy of pushing the envelope, is well poised to figure out what the library of today and tomorrow looks like.”

To King, that means looking beyond the paper foundation most libraries are built on. With master’s degrees in library science and history from the University of Maryland, College Park, King understands that the fundamental shift from paper to digital means restructuring the library to be as robust virtually as it is physically.
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