Larry Alford has been the University Chief Librarian at the University of Toronto since August 2011. The University of Toronto Library (UTL) System is the largest university research library in Canada and ranks among the top five in North America. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the University of Toronto Press. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Alford was the Dean of University Libraries at Temple University. The Temple University Press also reported to him. Preceding his role at Temple, he worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than 30 years in a variety of positions including Deputy University Librarian and Interim University Librarian.
Alford has been extensively involved in a variety of cooperative activities over his career. He served as a board member and chair of the Southeastern Library Network and as a member and President of the OCLC Members Council. He also served as a trustee of OCLC from 2002 to 2014 and as its board chair from 2007 to 2012. Within Canada, the UTL under Larry’s leadership is the service provider for Scholars Portal providing information technology tools to Ontario’s university libraries. It is also the service provider for Borealis; offering research data management and preservation support to 70 institutions across Canada and more recently for Scholaris, a service being developed to provide hosted infrastructure and other support for Canadian institutional repositories.
Alford is an active member of the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), serving as a member of CARL’s Board of Directors from 2018 to 2020. He served on the ARL Board from 2013 to 2017 and as president of ARL in 2016. Alford also served as a member of the Board of Directors of Canadiana.org, a Canadian non-profit which provides digital access to Canadian heritage collections. He is also on the board of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network which licenses resources for libraries across Canada and the board of Centre for Research Libraries located in Chicago.
Alford holds a B.A. and M.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he serves on the Board of Visitors of the School of Information and Library Science (SILS). He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from SILS in May 2005. He was recipient of the Hugh Atkinson Memorial Award from the American Library Association in 2018 and of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries Award for Distinguished Service to Research Librarianship in 2021.