After 23 years leading UC Berkeley's library, Elizabeth Dupuis steps back

Elizabeth Dupuis spent the pandemic doing something small that mattered: emailing her library staff every single day. Short dispatches. A reminder they weren't alone. "I loved writing those little daily messages," she said. "It was a way to tell people they weren't alone."

It's a fitting summary of her 23 years at UC Berkeley. Dupuis, who retires in January as the library's senior associate university librarian, built her career on showing up — for students, for staff scattered across more than 20 library locations, for the institution itself when it needed steadying.

When COVID-19 hit, the library had to remake itself overnight. Services shifted. Hundreds of employees adjusted how they worked. Dupuis had a hand in nearly every decision. "It was the most exhausting and energizing period of my professional life," she said.

The long arc of showing up

This wasn't her first time building something from the ground up. Dupuis started volunteering at her public library in New Jersey around age 11 — an experience that, as she puts it, "opened the doors." She earned her master's in information and library science, then joined UC Berkeley in 2002 as head of Instructional Services.

What followed was a quiet accumulation of influence. She led a Mellon-grant-funded project that transformed how thousands of students learned in the library. Her role expanded. Eventually she oversaw nearly half the library's workforce — a sprawling operation that required both vision and the ability to hold dozens of threads without dropping a single one.

Perhaps her most telling moment came in 2010, when students occupied Doe Library's North Reading Room to protest budget cuts. Dupuis walked into the room and handled it with firmness and genuine care. She didn't dismiss them. She didn't patronize them. She met them as people with legitimate concerns.

That's the pattern: Dupuis has always understood that libraries aren't really about books. They're about people — students figuring out who they are, staff trying to do meaningful work, institutions trying to serve their communities. She's been a steady hand guiding the vision for the Carol T. Christ Center for Connected Learning at Moffitt Library, a revitalized space that will carry her mark forward.

As she prepares to leave, Dupuis has distilled her message down to two things: "Be kind" and "stay curious." The warm emails from staff after she announced her retirement felt like the best possible send-off — a time capsule of what happens when someone leads with both empathy and conviction.