Wayne Winborne has a knack for reeling off liner-note trivia from classic ’70s jazz albums, and in his 20s he gave serious thought to becoming a professional saxophone player. But he has never sat behind a circulation desk or charged anybody a fine for returning a past-due book.

So when friends started telling him last spring that he should apply to be the executive director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Newark, home to the country’s most extensive jazz archive and library, he demurred.

“I heard the words ‘library’ and ‘archive’ and I thought, ‘I’m not that guy,’ ” he said recently from a conference room at the institute that doubles as a gallery for showing off treasures like Curly Russell’s bass.

For the last five years, Mr. Winborne, 55, of Brooklyn, had run the Winborne Group, a consulting company with offices in New York City and Los Angeles. Eight years before that, he was vice president for business diversity outreach at Prudential Financial in Newark.