Ex-Senate president in race to head BPL

Birmingham on short list, 3 assert

Thomas F. Birmingham, the former state Senate president and onetime candidate for governor, is competing against five professional librarians to take over the helm of the Boston Public Library, according to three people briefed on the selection process.

While his prospects are uncertain, Birmingham's name is on a short list for the post along with three women and two men who run large libraries in other cities, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The head of the search committee, retired Harvard Business School Dean John H. McArthur, said Friday that he plans in the next 10 days to present the list to the nine-member board of library trustees, who will select a president. He declined to reveal the candidates' identities until that time. The names of Birmingham's competitors for the post could not be independently learned.

"They've all said to us, 'We're toast if this gets out,' " McArthur said Friday, explaining the need for secrecy. "None of them applied for the job; these are all people where we've gone to them."

Birmingham did not return calls for comment. He was president of the Massachusetts Senate from 1996 to 2002, when he ran for the Democratic nomination for governor but lost to then-treasurer Shannon O'Brien. Since his departure from politics, he has been practicing law in the private sector.

Birmingham, Harvard-trained and a Rhodes scholar, has been less than secretive about his desire for the library post, touring many of the library's 27 neighborhood branches in the past several months and speaking with employees about the library system, one of the oldest and largest in the nation, the sources said.

The six-month search for a successor to Bernard A. Margolis, who was ousted by the Board of Trustees after 11 years in the post, has mostly occurred behind closed doors.

Birmingham is a friend of the chairman of the library Board of Trustees, Jeffrey B. Rudman, who is also a search committee member and fellow Rhodes scholar.

Rudman said he recused himself from any discussions or votes on Birmingham's candidacy, although he said Friday that he would not step down from the board if Birmingham became president.

Birmingham's Beacon Hill background and lack of library experience could be liabilities. Also, one community library group said it hopes the trustees will choose someone with strong preservation experience, which can be directed at protecting the Boston Public Library's rare artifacts. The Associates of The Boston Public Library, a nonprofit library support organization that was critical of the trustees' decision to oust Margolis, who admirers described as an intellectual and dedicated conservationist, said the choice should reflect "what is truly best for this great institution."

"The individual chosen to be the next president of the Boston Public Library must by necessity be a person whose talents are as varied as the library's holdings," said Vivian Spiro, chairman of the board of directors of The Associates of The Boston Public Library.

McArthur said the search for a new president, which began in December, has been fair and far-reaching.

The 14-member search committee relied on a professional search firm and began with a pool of about 150 candidates. He said they used 39 criteria to winnow the field of contenders, including leadership experience and knowledge of new technologies.

Specifically, he said, the library needs someone who can smooth over some of the divisions that opened within the library community after the library trustees voted in November to oust Margolis, a vote that some believed was engineered by Mayor Thomas M. Menino. At the time, critics accused the trustees of abandoning their statutory independence to do Menino's bidding - a charge that Rudman and other trustees have denied. Some critics, stalwart supporters and large donors, threatened to cut off support of the library.

"[The library] needs somebody that can kind of get people settled down and feeling great and appreciated for what they're doing," McArthur said.

The Globe reported yesterday that three of the seven trustees who voted to terminate Margolis have business ties to City Hall worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and they failed to publicly disclose that, as required by the state conflict of interest law. Had the trustees, Zamawa Arenas, Donna DePrisco and Karyn M. Wilson, voted to keep Margolis, he would have retained the job. DePrisco, Wilson, and Arenas, who is also on the search committee for a new president, said their ties to City Hall did not affect their votes.

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.