Senior Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries
Professor of Practice
Robert H. McDonald is Senior Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries in Austin. A passionate advocate for libraries and their role in an informed society, he leads the Austin campus library system in fulfilling their mission to advance teaching, catalyze research, and democratize learning in order to develop critical thinkers and global citizens.
His research and expertise in academic libraries, and within higher education more broadly, spans areas such as digital preservation and digital collections, learning eco-systems, scaled online learning, lean and agile frameworks in public management, and large-scale data infrastructure. He is active professionally in national and international organizations including Educause, UPCEA and the Association of Research Libraries.
In addition to his extensive publishing record, over the course of his career, McDonald has been the recipient of millions of dollars in grant funding from the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Sloan Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and other bodies. He currently holds an appointment as Professor of Practice in the School of Information at UT Austin.
Previous to his tenure at UT Austin, he served in leadership roles at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Indiana University Bloomington, the University of California San Diego and Florida State University. He is a proud alumnus of the University of South Carolina (Library Science) and the University of Georgia (Music). In his spare time he loves to hike and play music.
MLIS, University of South Carolina
MMus, University of Georgia
BMus, University of Georgia
Brantner, Amanda, Robert H. McDonald, Kelly Otter, Arshad Saiyed. Innovating Admission
Pathways and Access for Adult Learners, UPCEA Annual Conference 2024, March 26, 2024,
Boston, MA.
Fullington, R., McDonald, R.H., McAndrew, Q., "Balancing Affordability and Access: A Pilot
Project at the University of Colorado Boulder." 2023 Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and
Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), July 27, 2023,
Madison, WI.
Reynolds L, McDonald R, Knievel J, Kociolek P., 2023. The Cultural Heritage Collaborative:
Shared Mission and Spaces for Natural History and Library Collections In Cultural Heritage and
the Campus Community: Academic Libraries and Museums in Collaboration Volume 80. Assoc of
College & Research Libraries, Chicago, IL.
Linder, K, McDonald, R.H., Bullock, N. Hybrid Models and the Big Pivot for Online Learning
Infrastructure." WCET 34th Annual Meeting, October 18-21, 2022, Denver, CO.
Hardesty, Juliet, Jennifer Johnson, Jamie Wittenberg, Nathan Hall, Matt Cook, Zack Lischer-Katz,
Zhiwu Xie, & Robert McDonald. "3D Data Repository Features, Best Practices, and Implications
for Preservation Models: Findings from a National Forum." College & Research
Libraries [Online], 81.5 (2020): 789. Web. 10 Feb. 2022
B. A. Plale, E. Dickson, I. Kouper, S. H. Liyanage, Y. Ma, R. H. McDonald, et al., "Safe open
science for restricted data", Data and Information Management, vol. 3, pp. 50-60, Mar. 2019.
McDonald, R.H., Research Center as Distant Publisher: Developing Non-Consumptive
Compliant Open Data Worksets to Support New Modes of Inquiry. Digital Humanities 2017,
August 8-11, 2017, Montreal, CA.
Institute for Management and Leadership in Education Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard
University, 2025.
Executive Leadership Academy Fellow, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California Berkeley, 2024.
online education
library management
technology management
digital libraries
open-source software
open educational resources