Winston Tabb of Johns Hopkins University to Retire in 2022
NISO Member News
Baltimore, MD | December 22, 2021
Winston Tabb, who has served as Sheridan Dean of University Libraries, Archives and Museums at Johns Hopkins University since September 2002 as part of a distinguished libraries career that has spanned five decades, plans to retire next year, JHU President Ron Daniels and Provost Sunil Kumar announced in a message to the university community.
Tabb will remain at Johns Hopkins until a successor is in place to ensure a smooth transition, Daniels and Kumar wrote. The university is in the process of forming a search committee to identify a new leader for the libraries.
"Please join us in thanking Winston for his service to all the scholars who use our library resources," Daniels and Kumar wrote. "His embrace and stewardship of new projects and his deep commitment to sharing information, history, and public art with the university community and beyond has made a tremendous impact on Johns Hopkins and those we serve."
In his role, Tabb—who joined Johns Hopkins after a 30-year career at the Library of Congress—oversees library services in the five Sheridan Libraries and coordinates library services provided by all schools of the university through the University Library Directors Council, which he created and chairs. He is also director of Johns Hopkins' two historic house museums, Homewood Museum and Evergreen Museum & Library.
Early in his time at Johns Hopkins, Tabb led the unification of several major library systems into a single system to offer better and more seamless service to all library users across the institution. He also set up the libraries to operate more efficiently and economically by sharing all electronic resources as one university.
He led adoption of JHU's first "open access" policy, supported the development of PASS (public access submission system) to make compliance simple for JHU authors, and he worked with faculty across the university to develop a proposal for a JHU-wide Open Scholarship Committee. He also oversaw creation of the first Open Source Programs Office, or OSPO, at an American university.
Tabb has also been instrumental in construction planning for several major library projects, including the Brody Learning Commons, the Library Services Center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, and the renovations of the George Peabody Library and the Hutzler Reading Room. He is currently leading planning efforts for a renovation of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library on the Homewood campus and a new JHU library at the 555 Penn building in Washington, D.C., as the JHU libraries look toward the future of service in a changing information landscape.
The full text of the announcement from Johns Hopkins University may be found here.