Our Dean of University Libraries

Nandita S. Mani provides strategic, administrative, and financial leadership of the largest publicly supported research library in New England. An academic research library with a budget of $20 million (plus endowments and gift funds), and over 100 staff, UMass Amherst Libraries holds more than 8 million physical and digital items, and includes the W. E. B. Du Bois Center and the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA), which contains the papers and memoirs of W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, Daniel Ellsberg, Kenneth R. Feinberg, and hundreds of other collections documenting the lives and work of activists, innovators, political figures, spiritual leaders, writers, and more.

Dean Mani oversees the Libraries in its role as a strategic partner supporting the academic and research enterprise and represents the Libraries as a member of the international Association of Research Libraries, the Five College Library Consortium’s leadership committee, and the Board of the Boston Library Consortium.

Dean Mani also serves as a member of the Campus Leadership Team, actively collaborating with other campus Deans, Vice Chancellors, and the Provost to engage high-level campus priorities and lending her expertise on topics as varied as justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) efforts, data science and data management practices and infrastructure, and the activation of special collections as research and curricular supports.

Dean Mani also provides vision and leadership for the current capital campaign, including collaborating with campus leaders on cross-disciplinary initiatives toward transformational gifts; building personal relationships with major gift prospects and donors, and engaging a volunteer board of campaign advisors. Dean Mani convenes and directs the Library Leadership Team, which includes two Associate Deans (with a further two to be hired in 2023); Director of Library Communications; Director of Human Resources, Diversity, and Inclusion; Director of Administrative Services; Executive Director of Library Development, and the Dean’s Executive Assistant.

Prior to her arrival at UMass Amherst, Dean Mani had transformational roles at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she led the development of the UNC University Libraries’ data science framework, which articulated how the libraries can contribute to campus-wide data-science initiatives and was part of the UNC Libraries’ Reckoning Initiative to build antiracism into the Libraries’ policies, procedures and approaches. Prior to that she led and participated in curriculum transformation efforts at UNC’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor medical school.

Her publishing experience has been in areas including information science, diversity, equity, inclusion, health literacy, and instructional design and technology. A recognized expert on data science in libraries, Dean Mani is co-editor and author of Academic Libraries as Partners in Data Science Ecosystems, published in 2022. Another co-edited book, entitled Perspectives on Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Libraries, is forthcoming in 2023.

Dean Mani received her bachelor’s degree from Concordia University of Edmonton, Alberta, and subsequently earned a master’s in library and information science and a Ph.D. in instructional technology, from Wayne State University in Detroit.