Brian E. C. Schottlaender, The Audrey Geisel University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego since 1999, is one of the most prominent leaders in the academic library world.  Under Schottlaender’s direction, the UC San Diego Libraries have built world-class collections and innovative services, and have excelled in the development and implementation of cutting-edge digital technologies in support of national and global digitization and digital preservation initiatives. 

Over the last decade—during Schottlaender’s tenure as UC San Diego’s University Librarian—the UCSD Libraries have risen to the ranks of the nation’s top 20 public academic research libraries.  During this time, collection endowments at the UCSD Libraries have increased by almost 50%; total print and digital library holdings have increased dramatically, and journal offerings have expanded by more than 100%. Today, the Libraries’ vast resources and services are accessed on the World Wide Web almost 90,000 times a day .

The UC San Diego Libraries were the first in Southern California to partner with Google on its global book digitization project. Additionally, under Schottlaender’s leadership, the UCSD Libraries have played a key role in building out the Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance (PRDLA)—an international consortium of 30 prestigious academic libraries—to facilitate user access to scholarly research materials by using digital technologies. Long a proponent of cooperation between and amongst libraries and related organizations, Schottlaender is a member of the Executive Committee of the San Diego Supercomputer Center; the OCLC Board of Trustees; and the executive committee of the Hathi Trust, a consortium of universities (including the University of California) that is building one of the largest online collections of books ever assembled. He is also an elected member of the Steering Committee of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and of the governing Council of the American Library Association.

Currently, Schottlaender is an Investigator on three extramurally funded projects with national significance, including:

• WEST (The Western Regional Storage Trust), an initiative funded by The Mellon Foundation to develop a distributed, shared retrospective journals repository among research libraries in the western U.S.;
• ArchivesSpace, an initiative also funded by The Mellon Foundation to create a next-generation suite of software tools for managing archival collections; and
• Chronopolis, a Library of Congress-funded initiative to create the create the distributed computer infrastructure needed to collect and preserve at-risk digital information for the long term.

In 2010, Schottlaender was named the Melvil Dewey Medal winner by the American Library Association in recognition of “creative leadership of a high order.” Schottlaender, who held positions at the California Digital Library, UCLA, the University of Arizona, and Indiana University before joining UC San Diego, was also recognized for his significant achievements in collections management by the American Library Association with the 2007 Ross Atkinson Lifetime Achievement Award.