13 Facts About Sidney Verba

Sidney Verba was an American political scientist, librarian and library administrator.

Sidney Verba was the Carl H Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University and served Harvard as the director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007.

Sidney Verba began graduate school in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, intending to join the foreign service, but transferred to Princeton's politics department and earned a PhD.

In 1964, Sidney Verba moved to Stanford University, where he was a full professor for four years, and the University of Chicago for another four years.

Sidney Verba's committee managed to preserve the traditional eight-day reading periods for undergraduates, one of the best features of the former calendar, while eliminating impediments to student cross-registration.

Harvard President Derek Bok named Sidney Verba to be director of Harvard University Library in 1984; and when news of Sidney Verba's retirement was received in Massachusetts Hall, Bok observed:.

When Sidney Verba retired from the post, he had served longer than anyone else who had held the title of director of the University Library; and not since Thaddeus Harris, whose tenure straddled the card catalog revolution of the 19th century, had anyone spent so long at the top of Harvard's libraries.

Sidney Verba was ultimately responsible for Harvard's participation in the Google Books Library Project, which involves a series of agreements between Google and major international libraries through which a collection of its public domain books will be scanned in their entirety and made available for free to the public online.

Sidney Verba's role encompassed developing digitization protocols, addressing logistical and operations issues, and administering the project.

Friends and colleagues of Sidney Verba established a $2.5 million endowment fund in his honor.

Under the terms creating the fund, Sidney Verba himself was given the freedom to designate the purpose of the new endowment.

Sidney Verba built on the theory of civic culture that was developed in this book with many of his students and collaborators, including Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry E Brady, over the following half century.

Sidney Verba's published writings encompass 83 works in 201 publications in 8 languages and 16,633 library holdings.