Scott Libson

Scott Libson is the Special Collections Librarian at Yale’s Divinity Library. He oversees one of the world’s best collections of missionary records and his responsibilities include collection building, instruction, and exhibitions. Between 2018 and 2022 he was the Librarian for History, Jewish Studies, and Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He is a co-author of the new Guidelines for Secondary Source Literacy for History, an official document of the Reference and User Services Association, a division of the American Library Association. He is co-editing a forthcoming book, under contract with the Association of College and Research Libraries, about the ways that different disciplines teach information literacy in higher education.

Libson has degrees from Columbia University, Yale University, and Emory University. At Emory, where he did his Ph.D. in history, Libson was a George W. Woodruff Fellow. During the 2015–16 academic year, he was a dissertation fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. His research has also been supported by Columbia University, the Newberry Library, the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving, among others. His peer-reviewed history publications examine the role of American Protestant missionaries who promoted secular philanthropies in the early twentieth century. He has presented at numerous history and library conferences and serves on several editorial boards.