Biography

Kevin J. Comerford is an academic library leader, technologist, and digital preservation advocate whose career spans more than three decades across universities, museums, and the technology industry. He currently serves as Dean of the Library at New Mexico State University, where he guides strategic initiatives that strengthen research support, digital infrastructure, and student-centered learning spaces. Under his leadership, NMSU has launched transformative projects, including the Emerging Technologies Learning Lab and the university’s first institutional repository, Digital Commons.

Before joining NMSU, Comerford held senior leadership roles at the University of California, Riverside, including serving as Associate University Librarian for Research, Technology, and the Digital Library. There, he established the Digital Initiatives unit, expanded digital scholarship services, and led major efforts in digital preservation, VR publishing, robotics education, and data/GIS learning environments. His earlier tenure at the University of New Mexico further solidified his reputation as a builder of large-scale digital collections and research data services, directing both the Digital Initiatives and IT Services departments while overseeing statewide and multi-institutional digital archives, including the New Mexico Digital Collections and the Rocky Mountain Online Archive. He also developed important Digital Humanities initiatives, including the Tony Hillerman Portal and the Rudolfo Anaya Digital Archive.

Comerford’s professional foundation also includes a significant chapter in the private sector: more than a decade at Microsoft, where he founded and directed the Media Content Management Group, the corporation’s central media library and archive. He oversaw a 2-branch library facility holding 100,000 physical volumes and a one‑petabyte digital repository. He also managed global streaming media services, corporate photography, and implemented enterprise-scale digital asset management systems—work that earned him Microsoft’s MVP Award. His earlier roles in museums, including the Dallas Museum of Art and the Sixth Floor Museum, reflect a long-standing commitment to cultural heritage, technological innovation in digitization and web development, and public access to information.

Across his career, Comerford has taught graduate courses, delivered dozens of national and international presentations, and secured substantial grant funding to advance digital scholarship, data curation, and cultural preservation. His publications span topics from digital libraries to metadata workflows, and his artwork has been exhibited nationally. On LinkedIn, he describes himself as dedicated to advancing academic libraries as active centers of knowledge—an ethos reflected in his leadership, his service to professional organizations, and his ongoing work to integrate emerging technologies into higher education.