Katy Webb

In 2020, Katy Webb accepted the position of Director of Yale Access Services and Bass Library at Yale University. She worked on many space projects in the libraries at Yale, as she was the space owner and representative for the user experience for the Bass Library, and for iconic user-facing spaces in Yale’s historic Sterling Memorial Library. She was actively involved in the renovation of the Linonia and Brothers Reading Room, a $9M capital project, and coordinated the selection and reinstallation of the collection of 17,000 leisure reading books in the room.
Katy Webb received tenure and promotion at East Carolina University to Associate Professor and holds the rank of Professor at Stetson University. She is deeply committed to being a teacher-scholar and has written and presented extensively, including the 2018 book, Development of Creative Spaces in Academic Libraries: A Decisionmaker’s Guide, published by Chandos Publishing. Katy’s research interests include library space usage, library labs, library student employee engagement, how libraries can contribute to the High Impact Practices for Student Success (HIPs), and mindfulness, yoga, and burnout in libraries. She has spoken at national and international conferences on these topics and others. A full listing of her academic articles and books is available on ORCID

Katy was the recipient of a Fulbright Specialist grant that took her to Leiden, in the Netherlands in 2019 and 2022, to partner with the Centre for Digital Scholarship in the University of Leiden library. This productive collaboration resulted in three written articles and multiple presentations, some in conjunction with her Fulbright host,  Laurents Sesink, PhD. The Fulbright project included reviewing the library’s space to consider a lab for CDS, but additionally included research on the drivers of library labs and their impact on Open Science in the Netherlands and worldwide.

By reframing the whole library as a lab, we will continue the thread of innovation that this library has embodied for the last 60 plus years, which will include improvements to our archival collections online, broadening our reach to the university community online through additional web-based services, the addition of new end-point technology and spaces to support innovation. By discovering new ways to expand the concept of innovation throughout the library, we will support teaching and learning in the Stetson community, as well as to complement the Innovation Lab and the work of our building partners, the Hollis Family Student Success Center and the Writing Center.