When 6 feet felt like a million miles, Elizabeth Dupuis found ways to stay close.
As COVID-19 tore across the globe, anxiety was running high. Hand sanitizer and toilet paper were scarce, but Dupuis’ steady leadership was abundant.
Each workday, Dupuis emailed a dispatch to the UC Berkeley Library’s staff — glimmers of humanity in a fragmented world.
In an email announcing the full closure of UC Berkeley’s libraries in March 2020, Dupuis suffused the practical with the personal, a tone that would define her pandemic-era missives. “For now, take a deep breath and be well — we are all in this together,” she wrote.
“I loved writing those little daily messages,” Dupuis said in a recent interview. “It was a way to tell people they weren’t alone.”
The Library adapted to an ever-shifting reality, reshaping its services and adjusting the work lives of hundreds of employees across 20-plus locations. Dupuis had a hand in just about every facet of the transformation, from designing new ways to provide students with study spaces and course materials to creating a road map to help guide the Library through the challenges ahead. On a typical night, Dupuis would get three or four hours of sleep.
“It was the most exhausting and energizing period of my professional life,” she said.
If anyone was built for the moment, it was Dupuis. She has spent a lifetime in libraries, a path that started in childhood as a trusted volunteer at her public library and ultimately led her to the UC Berkeley Library, where she serves in the wide-ranging role of senior associate university librarian for educational initiatives and user services, and director of the Doe, Moffitt, and subject specialty libraries.
Now, Dupuis’ departure looms. After 23 years at UC Berkeley, she is retiring in January, closing out the final chapter in a distinguished career.
After stepping into the role of university librarian in the summer of 2024, Suzanne Wones, who oversees the entire UC Berkeley Library system, came to appreciate Dupuis’ tremendous wisdom. Working with Dupuis, she said, has been “inspiring.”
“Beth is so on top of everything and so connected to every corner of campus, I have just been awestruck,” Wones said.
“Everyone is a little nervous about all of the institutional knowledge that will be walking out with her departure,” she added, “but she has built a strong, resilient, well-oiled machine that will keep working hard to serve the needs of the UC Berkeley community.”
A lifetime in libraries
Dupuis’ passion for service and her ability to hold many threads at once without letting them tangle started well before she arrived at UC Berkeley.
Dupuis’ childhood was a swirl of activities: band, volunteering, jobs, and more.
“I was always doing a million things,” she said.
As a Girl Scout in New Jersey, she earned every badge and award she could, filling three sashes. She was honored with the Gold Award, the highest achievement in Girl Scouts, at an unusually young age.
Early on, Dupuis’ mother instilled in her daughter a love of reading. Naturally, a love of libraries began to blossom.
To Dupuis, a library was a place where she could surround herself with stories and ideas, and satisfy her curiosity on nearly any topic imaginable — from intriguing strains of philosophy to historical events she had yet to discover.
When she was around 11 years old, she began to volunteer at her public library in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. She would help run the children’s craft and film programs in the summertime, and substituted for the head librarian when she would take vacations.
“That was inspirational,” Dupuis said. “It opened the doors — to have that kind of trust.”
After high school, Dupuis attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As an English literature major, she spent untold hours in the libraries working on papers. There, she witnessed the expertise and support of librarians, and the ways technology was changing how researchers interacted with information. It was enough to inspire her to pursue a career in libraries. In June 1991, the summer after earning her bachelor’s degree, she entered the university’s library school, completing her master’s in information and library science the next year.
Patty Iannuzzi remembers the first time she encountered Dupuis. Iannuzzi had caught a presentation by the young librarian, who was working at the University of Texas at Austin, at a conference on library instruction. She was struck by Dupuis’ radical focus on students and her understanding of how to engage them in the research process. “I said, ‘This person is going to be a star,’” recalled Iannuzzi, who was serving as associate university librarian and director of Doe and Moffitt libraries at UC Berkeley.
“I was so excited because I knew that she embodied the future for our profession,” said Iannuzzi, who went on to become the dean of the libraries at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Iannuzzi began to recruit Dupuis. It took some coaxing — Dupuis wasn’t looking for a new job. But in the spring of 2002, she packed up and headed to the West Coast to start as the head of Instructional Services at the UC Berkeley Library.
‘An indelible imprint’
At UC Berkeley, Dupuis didn’t waste any time before making waves.
Under Iannuzzi’s oversight, Dupuis provided leadership for a Mellon-grant-funded project that would transform the learning experience for thousands of students, first at UC Berkeley and then around the world. The Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship for Undergraduate Research brought together librarians and faculty members across disciplines to redesign large-enrollment courses, bringing them to life through hands-on research experience. The program inspired similar initiatives at universities in the United States, including Cornell, as well as institutions abroad.
In the summer of 2006, Dupuis became an associate university librarian. In her new position, Dupuis’ responsibilities and influence grew. Her portfolio gradually ballooned to include overseeing nearly half of the Library’s workforce.
As associate university librarian, Dupuis has kept students as her North Star. Since the project began, Dupuis has been a steady hand guiding into reality the vision for the Carol T. Christ Center for Connected Learning at Moffitt Library, adapting to changing circumstances and financial headwinds. In 2016, Moffitt’s vibrantly reimagined top two floors — the first to be renovated — opened to students. Ten years later, in the fall of 2026, the hugely popular library will swing open its doors after the lower three levels are refreshed. Under Dupuis’ leadership, the project is transforming how undergraduates study, create, and collaborate in the space. The revitalized library, when it reopens, will serve as an enduring reminder of Dupuis’ years of tireless work.
“She has left an indelible imprint on the university library, and in particular, for the intellectual lives of our undergraduates,” said Cathy Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education emerita, who worked with Dupuis to realize the new vision for Moffitt.
Among staff, Dupuis is respected for her fierce advocacy of the Library, and for deftly balancing the needs of the university with the interests and aspirations of Library workers. “In the end, it’s only ever been about the people,” Dupuis said.
She also has an unerring commitment to service and an eagerness to help, no matter the task, from retrieving books from shelves for the digitization team, to listening and responding to the questions and concerns of students, to picking up an “Open/Closed” sign at a local printshop for one of the university’s libraries.
“I always got the sense that she puts herself out there, and she wouldn’t ask people to do things she wasn’t willing to do first,” said Sheehan Grant, chief operations manager for the Library’s Arts & Humanities Division, who has been working with Dupuis since she arrived on campus. “I’m not sure they make people like Beth anymore.”
‘Best gifts’
Of all the memories Dupuis has collected during her time at Berkeley, one stands out the most.
In the fall of 2010, students had organized a rally on Sproul Plaza in protest of budget cuts to public education. After the rally, the crowd filtered into Doe Library’s North Reading Room. Hundreds of students occupied the space, lining the bookshelves with banners. Chants reverberated through the room. Police blocked off the reading room to prevent more people from entering.
In a photograph published by UC Berkeley News, Dupuis addresses the group, projecting a calm authority. The students were welcome in the library, she said to the crowd. She urged them to show respect — to the space, and to one another.
To Gisèle Tanasse, the photograph is a visual encapsulation of one of Dupuis’ rare gifts.
“I think a lot of administrators probably shield their hearts in some ways by being a bit more heavy-handed,” said Tanasse, UC Berkeley’s film and media services librarian and assistant head of the Library’s Instruction Services Division.
But not Dupuis, she said. Dupuis handled the situation firmly, Tanasse noted, but with sympathy and care for students and staff members.
“That’s one of the ways that I’m going to remember her — standing (in the reading room) with that loudspeaker,” she said.
In early October, Tanasse was leaving the library after a day of work when she saw Dupuis’ email announcing her retirement.
“I cried on my whole walk to the car,” she said.
Soon after Dupuis announced her departure, the emails came rushing in. But unlike in the earliest days of the pandemic, they were traveling in the opposite direction, warm words from staff members lamenting the loss of a leader.
“I don’t quite know how to thank you for all you have done for me over the years,” Tanasse wrote in her email to Dupuis. “But know that I celebrate you and your incredible career with much fondness in my heart (and today a few tears too).”
On the eve of retirement, Dupuis said she feels like she’s “getting ready to jump out of a plane.” (Dupuis, it should be noted, is afraid of heights.) But, she said, she’s ready. Among the messages she hopes to impart to the Library’s staff as she leaves are to “be kind” and “stay curious.”
The emails from members of the Library’s staff that flooded her inbox after she announced her retirement were the “best gifts I could ever get,” Dupuis said. She gathered them in a single document on her computer. There, they serve as a time capsule — a record of how much she has meant to the Library, to the university, and to those who have walked with her on the path.
Someday, she said, she’ll turn to the notes again.
“I think that’ll be my reward at some point,” she said. “People said super nice things that were reflective — that made me feel like, you know, you matter.”