Welcome to all our students and faculty for the fall semester. I’d like to introduce myself as your new Library Director. I follow in the footsteps of Dr. Virginia Cherry, who served the Richard Bland College Library with excellence for 19 years, most of those as the Library Director, before her retirement this year on June 29th.

My background has been with large university libraries at the University of Tennessee and, for the last 26 years, at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I held various roles in reference service, library instruction, distance education, and community outreach. I also held the honor of serving as the Faculty Senate President at VCU from 2007-2009. For the first 7 years of my career, I worked at the University of Tennessee’s Undergraduate Library, where the most important people walking in our doors were thought to be the freshmen. Somehow that attitude always stayed with me, and my move to this school is, in part, because I most enjoy working with beginning college students, like those at Richard Bland College. Another major reason for my move here is the fantastic librarians in this library, Irene Handy and Jacqueline Carrell, each of whom handle the work of multiple departments at a large university library, and do so with cheerful enthusiasm and keen intelligence. I am learning new things from both of them every day.

I hope in the years ahead to help make the Richard Bland College Library and its talented librarians a more important part of every student’s education at RBC and to help the library here become even more of a social learning center for our RBC faculty and staff. If you have questions, suggestions, or concerns about our library, or just want to say hello, please contact me (see below) or ask for me in person at the library’s front desk.

Dan Ream
Associate Professor and Library Director
Richard Bland College
dream@rbc.edu
(804) 862-6208