As academic libraries face ongoing retirements and organizational restructuring, early career librarians are increasingly assuming supervisory or managerial responsibilities earlier in their careers. Yet questions remain about how prepared they feel for these roles and what kind of support contributes most to their confidence and effectiveness. This presentation reports the results of a national survey conducted in 2024 exploring early career academic librarians’ perceptions of their readiness for management. The survey gathered quantitative and qualitative data from over 70 respondents with fewer than ten years of professional experience across a range of academic library settings.
Findings suggest that while many early career librarians find themselves in management positions, fewer feel adequately equipped to take them on. This presentation will share key data themes on how library managers did and did not feel prepared, highlight respondent narratives, and discuss possible implications for library administrators, professional associations, and LIS programs. There will also be several breakout sessions for participants to discuss their own management situations and brainstorm how to best support new incoming managers. Attendees will gain insight into how institutions can better support leadership development for early career professionals and foster more intentional management onboarding within academic libraries.
Like many libraries, the Davidson College Library is organized around functional teams focused on the various aspects of the library’s work and mission: research collections, archives and special collections, access and outreach, digital engagement, and research and instruction. This structure acknowledges specializations and strengthens those cores, but it also creates silos. To overcome these silos, library leadership at Davidson worked to create person-centered processes that honor individuals' ideas for strategic projects, encourage collaboration across functional units, and empower team members to “lead from where they are” in a relatively flat organization.
This presentation will outline the library’s “Great Ideas” process in which library staff, having connected with key partners across teams, identify and pitch projects that further the library’s strategic priorities. Because overcoming silos is complicated work, a re-imagined organizational structure of “Learning Networks” helps to facilitate shared professional interests and peer-to-peer learning, while a “unit” structure brings together staff with shared focus on collections and teaching, and defined “Systems” and “Professional Well-Being” steering groups further identify and prioritize collaborative work. This human-networked framework provides opportunities for leadership and growth at all levels of the organization, lowers the barriers to connecting with similarly-motivated colleagues from across the library, and builds a sense of belonging amongst staff. After sharing the story of the Great Ideas process and collaborative work structures, the presenters will facilitate an opportunity for attendees to identify pain points to collaboration, explore potential affinity groups, and create actionable steps to establish their own great ideas process.
In this prolonged period of disruption for libraries, old ways of working just aren’t cutting it. At our R1 university library, we had long supported researchers and students using a liaison model, with librarians providing instruction, reference, collection development, and outreach to their assigned college unit. Liaisons were organizationally situated in disciplinary departments with some shared work, but largely liaisons managed and went about their work independently. This approach gave liaisons autonomy, deepened their relationships on campus, and amplified their unique expertise. However, it also came with unequal workloads, isolation, and a scramble when there was staff turnover. Leaner budgets and a bumpy environment for higher education exacerbated these downsides to our existing model. To address these challenges, our library embarked this past year on a significant reevaluation of our liaison model. We wanted to build in greater sustainability, workload equity, and more opportunities for collaboration. We also rejected the model of 'doing more with less'.
The three presenters of this session, department directors overseeing liaison work, led a project to study our current liaison model and propose new ways of working. Our session will share our process, including (1) our initial project brief, (2) how we structured our work, (3) key findings, (4) our recommendations, and (5) our implementation plan. Throughout, we’ll address how we adopted change management principles to earn trust and support from the liaisons most affected. Attendees will come away with ideas for how to ask similar questions and address challenges at their own libraries.
