Fine Arts Librarian
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William Keller
Fine Arts Librarian
William Keller
Subject Specialist in Architecture, City & Regional Planning, Fine Arts, Historic Preservation, & Landscape Architecture
Bill's B.A. is from Yale, where he focused on European and Urban History. He received an M.S. from the Columbia University School of Library Service, an M.A. in the History of Art from Columbia and a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Delaware. Bill has worked in cataloging, art reference, and special collections administration at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale; Maryland Historical Society; George Washington University; and Johns Hopkins University. At Penn, Bill has overall responsibility for developing and presenting resources in the visual arts and specializes in architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation, and city and regional planning. Bill's interests include the history of playing cards, sixteenth-century German graphic art, mapping the built environment, and the architecture of railroads, sports, and public spectacle. Bill reads German and, with a dictionary, Russian.
Fine Arts Librarian
Penn's Fisher Fine Arts Library, named for donors Jerome and Anne Fisher, is splendidly housed in the recently restored Frank Furness architectural masterpiece now registered as a national Historic Landmark. Serving diverse disciplines across the campus, the Fine Arts Library offers a wealth of materials, including 300,000 slides, 59,000 photographs, and over 100,000 printed volumes on architecture, city planning, history of art, landscape architecture, studio arts, historic preservation, urban design, and appropriate technology and energy management.

The Fine Arts Librarian oversees resources for Penn's extensive programs in art, architecture, and the built environment taught at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Wharton School, and the College of General Studies. While particularly strong in Western subjects, the collection includes holdings on the arts of Islam, South Asia, and the Far East.

The Fine Arts Library is given especially heavy use by the Graduate School of Fine Arts. It is also relied on intensively by the Department of the History of Art which teaches survey courses for the School of Arts and Sciences and the College of General Studies, some with hundreds of students, and offers an undergraduate major and graduate degrees through the Ph.D. The Library encompasses the Perkins Library, a special collection of some 2,000 rare books on architecture. Electronic resources, some among the most advanced in the world, include the Avery Index to Architectural periodicals, the Conservation Information Network, and the DIA-LOG.

The Fine Arts Librarian leads a first-rate staff in developing and managing these resources and in optimizing their use in teaching and research. The Librarian also works closely with distinguished faculty in planning the collections and services of the future. In addition, the Fine Arts Librarian plans and helps to design a program to utilize the resources of electronic technology in the acquisition, storage and delivery of both text and images for the research and teaching programs of the Graduate School of Fine Arts and the Department of the History of Art. A gift of $1,000,000 will endow a chair for this important library resource.