As dean of libraries and letters and the inaugural Connie Vinita Dowell University Librarian, Jon Shaw oversees the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt University. In addition to leading nine campus libraries and multiple research entities, including the Digital Lab, Slave Societies Digital Archive and Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Shaw has administrative oversight of the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies, the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies, and Vanderbilt University Press.
Since joining Vanderbilt in 2022, Shaw has positioned the libraries as central to the university’s intellectual life by working broadly to align research, pedagogy, experiential learning and technology initiatives. He guides programs that shape scholarly communication, publishing, archives, digital preservation, public programming and emerging technologies.
Under Shaw’s strategic direction, the libraries have launched several significant initiatives, including the Vanderbilt Cloud Innovation Lab for Libraries and Applied Digital Preservation with Amazon Web Services, a Google Books agreement to digitize more than half a million volumes from Vanderbilt’s collections, a collaboration to advance the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s cloud infrastructure, and partnerships with Canadian universities to preserve Indigenous cultures. He also has led an expansive open access strategy, which has enabled the publication of thousands of peer-reviewed articles by Vanderbilt researchers while driving a significant increase in citation impact, and expanded the university’s public programming through partnerships with Parnassus Books and the Southern Festival of Books.
Prior to Vanderbilt, Shaw was associate vice provost and deputy university librarian at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he served as the lead administrator for operations, chief strategist and senior adviser to the H. Carton Rogers III Vice Provost of the Penn Libraries.
A frequent invited speaker on research libraries, scholarly communication and knowledge systems, Shaw holds memberships and leadership roles with the Association of Research Libraries Board of Directors, Clarivate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Research Library, and other national and international organizations. He is also a former Senior Fellow in UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies (2016), an Association of Research Libraries Leadership Fellow (2018–19) and an Amazon Web Services Education Champion (2024).