New faces in library leadership

Posted by on Tuesday, June 19, 2012 in News, Spring 2012.

Dean of Libraries Connie Vinita Dowell has added two deans to her leadership group and promoted three other members to top positions.

At Vanderbilt Law School, Larry R. Reeves is now the associate dean and director of the Alyne Queener Massey Law Library and associate dean, law, of the Vanderbilt University Libraries. He was also appointed associate professor of law. Nancy Godleski is the new assistant dean for collections, responsible for coordinating collection development activities for eight campus libraries as well as directing activities for the library’s off-campus storage facility (annex) and interlibrary loan/document delivery service.

“Larry Reeves brings an impressive amount of administrative and teaching experience to Vanderbilt,” said Chris Guthrie, dean of the Law School.

“I look forward to the contributions he will make to Vanderbilt’s Massey Law Library and to our J.D. and LL.M. programs.”

Reeves had been the associate director of the George Mason University Law Library in Arlington, Va. He earned his law degree at Temple University, his master’s at Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science and his bachelor’s from the University of Oklahoma.

Before joining George Mason’s law library, he was a reference librarian, coordinator of first-year legal research, and an adjunct associate professor of law at Fordham Law School in New York, where he developed and taught a required first-year course, Basic Legal Research, trained other librarians to teach the course, and taught Advanced Legal Research. He has also served as a reference librarian in the law libraries of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, N.Y. He served on an advisory board for the program in Law Librarianship at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science.

“We are fortunate to attract leaders like Nancy and Larry, who bring such diverse and successful experience to our already strong leadership team.

I know that they will guide our libraries to new achievements,” Dowell said.

Godleski began her library career at Vanderbilt in 1994, spending two years as a history bibliographer and reference librarian. Most recently, she was an account executive with ProQuest Government Information Services (formerly LexisNexis Library Research Solutions). Prior to that, Godleski was the Kaplanoff Librarian for American History and American Studies at the Yale University Library. She holds master’s degrees in library science and history from Indiana University-Bloomington and earned her bachelor’s from Hanover College.

Also, three leaders in the dean’s administrative group have assumed new responsibilities. Jody Combs, formerly assistant dean for information technology, has been promoted to associate dean of libraries. He manages the newly reorganized Library Digital Services group, including the Television News Archive and OAK. Combs is also involved in strategic initiatives.

Bill Hook, formerly assistant dean, is now associate dean. He is the interim director of Central Library and continues as the director of the Divinity Library. Six of the eight libraries in the Heard System—Central, Divinity, Management, Music, Peabody, and Science and Engineering—report through him.

Jean T. Klockenkemper has been named executive director of finance and administration for the libraries. She joined the library as director of financial affairs in 2010, and in her new role she will add oversight of human resources and physical facilities to her areas of responsibility.

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