Dean, University of South Florida Libraries

Dean Chavez has developed expertise in a variety of areas in the USF Libraries in his 30 year tenure, including ILL, access services, human resources, and collections & technical services. Accepting the role of dean in 2015 has positioned him to leverage this base of knowledge and move a number of innovative initiatives forward. Chavez enjoys exploring a variety of subject areas, making connections between them, and visualizing how the library can be a central, discipline-neutral point of service to meet unfilled needs.

Primary Areas of Focus

• Library administration, finance, and planning
• Digital Library/collection implementation and management
• Digital scholarship and research applications of technology
• Geospatial collections and services

Education

• Master of Arts, Library and Information Science, University of South Florida
• Bachelor of Arts, Anthropology, University of South Florida

Research Interests

I am particularly interested in the intersection between library and information science and interdisciplinary research topics that include natural history, the geosciences, and geospatial data, tools, and methods.

Current Activities

Current activities include the Florida Environment & Natural History Collection initiative and the USF Herbarium; ongoing projects include the Karst Information Portal project. During his tenure at the USF Libraries, Chavez launched several strategic directions including the Center for Digital Heritage & Geospatial Information, the Data Analytics Team, the Open-Access Publishing team, and the institution’s digital repository of scholarly output.

Past projects include data management for the Center for Integrated Modeling & Analysis of Gulf Ecosystems I-III, the Gulf Oil Spill Information Center, the Cave Mineral Database, the Ethiopian National Research Databank, and digital collections supporting sustainability research at Costa Rica’s Monteverde Research Institute.

Selected Publications

In addition to his primary duties, Chavez has published and presented on bibliometric analyses of scientific research, information portal design and deployment, and the role of “greyliterature” in interdisciplinary scholarship. His articles and presentations appear in Publishing Research Quarterly, Numeracy, the Journal of Cave & Karst Studies, and the Proceedings of the 18th National Cave and Karst Management Symposium.