Conference on Academic Library Management 2026

Conflict between employees in academic libraries often plays out behind closed doors, shielded by confidentiality policies, HR protocols, and privacy requirements. While these safeguards are essential, they can create an impression among staff that leadership is inactive or indifferent. This session offers candid reflections based on composites of real-world scenarios, exploring the challenges of managing personnel issues when transparency is constrained.

Presenters will share how they approached mediation, collaborated with campus partners, documented concerns, and balanced institutional expectations with compassion and supporting mental well-being. And yet, even with multiple tools and proactive practices in place, there remains some sense of dissatisfaction after the process came to a close. They will reflect on lessons learned–including the value of early expectation setting, proactive communication strategies, and framing messages that respect confidentiality while aiming to foster trust–as well as some lingering disappointment still felt by the parties involved.

Because many library workers only see the silence surrounding personnel matters, this session aims to demystify what happens behind the scenes and equip leaders with practical tools for navigating both visible and invisible aspects of conflict. Attendees will leave with strategies to uphold integrity, empathy, and organizational stability during difficult situations.

Middle managers in academic libraries often occupy the most volatile seat in the building. Caught between shifting directives from senior leadership and raw emotion from front-line employees, middle managers feel the pressure even more acutely during organizational change. Empathy frequently shows up as an unspoken job expectation, yet few management frameworks explain how to operationalize empathy without turning a role in the middle into an emotional sponge.

Framed by empathetic leadership theory and grounded in a qualitative study of organizational change at the academic library of a large, public, research university, this session will introduce an “empathy amplifier” lens for middle management. Drawing on my doctoral research, I will share anonymized vignettes from middle managers who navigated change, using their stories to shape concrete supervisory behaviors, communication patterns, and workload strategies.

I want to take a candid look at some of the empathetic tension in managerial roles and provide suggestions and practical phrasing for situations such as high-anxiety announcements related to change or conducting performance reviews with care, clarity, and accountability, and also discuss structures designed to keep empathy sustainable for the middle manager rather than become a source of exhaustion. An empathetic framework can equip middle managers with a vocabulary and set of practices for amplifying empathy in academic libraries without sliding into burnout, even when authority and information might remain tightly constrained.

This session examines the unique challenges women encounter in management roles and offers strategies for leading with authenticity and impact. Leadership for women often involves more than decision-making—it includes navigating perceptions that influence credibility, authority, and whose voice is heard. We will explore how women can “show up” authentically while maintaining professionalism and influence in library environments. Through case studies, participants will practice techniques for handling difficult conversations that foster constructive dialogue and growth. The session also highlights mentoring practices and team-building approaches that build trust, strengthen collaboration, and boost morale. Attendees will leave with practical insights and actionable strategies to lead with confidence, clarity, and authenticity in today’s library landscape.

Creating a library strategic plan is a complex and time-consuming process that, at its worst, can feel like a performative song and dance for university administration. Library staff struggle to see their work in the strategic plan, the jargon involved can feel corporate and impersonal. Even with inclusively designed plans, it is often too easy to revert back to “the usual” operations after creating a new plan, and to take the plan out of a (virtual) drawer and dust it off only when it’s time for annual reporting.

In 2021, library administration at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University undertook an inclusive, collaborative approach to our next five-year strategic planning cycle, engaging with library staff and campus partners to refine goals, objectives, and actions. This presentation will introduce our planning process, but the main focus of the presentation will be the engagement that we designed to keep the plan alive and active at all levels of library operations throughout the year, and lessons we learned along the way. Regular check-ins with interdepartmental stakeholders increase shared understanding and accountability for the plan. These also allow us to adjust the plan as needed as priorities and opportunities evolve, in addition to meeting (even exceeding) expectations for university reporting. The conversational check-ins, scheduled three times per year, give everyone space to discuss questions (what are KPIs, even?), compare notes, and ask questions in a less high-stakes environment than plan creation or annual report periods.

Following the completion of the IMLS grant to the CALM community, the grant team will share key findings from our various research streams and recommendations for the academic library community for creating new and meaningful professional development opportunities for person-centered management practices.

As academic libraries sustain the brunt of ongoing reductions in campus operations, budget, and staffing, face rapid industrial disruptions, and participate in expanding organizational abandonment or industrial distancing from long-standing higher education and LIS values, library employee exposure to low-morale experiences, toxic resilience expectations, and burnout have amplified. These amplifications have sparked increased conversations about intersections of LIS worker health, industrial values, organizational performance, and the role of leadership in supporting employee well-being. While these valuable conversations help workers recognize how harmful experiences are encouraged and/or hidden by organizational and professional norms and acknowledge efforts to reduce the negative impacts of these experiences, established spaces for consistent communal reflection and recovery practice remain nascent in the field.

Building on Community of Practice (CoP) tenets, this session highlights an LIS-Mental Health practitioner collaboration focused on designing and offering harmed library workers opportunities to participate in a Community of Resonance and Experience (CoRE). An original concept that will be introduced in this session, a CoRE moves beyond a CoP by offering important sense-making information to traumatized library workers, curating conversation and learning opportunities with domain knowledge experts, and including purposeful activities for members to identify, consider, and practice self-preservation, collective care, and somatic awareness tools. CoRE goals may help employees at all levels (re-)kindle recovery from workplace harm, support incremental organizational culture improvement, and/or refine career clarity.

Recognizing that most organizations cannot absorb the cost of externally training a large pool of managers, this presentation explores how to leverage existing internal resources to build a leadership development program for managers of all library staff. In the field of library science, graduate programs provide limited managerial training, yet professionals are regularly promoted into leadership roles, often without access to professional development before assuming them. Program design and goals, time commitments, and collaboration are key components in developing a professional development program internally to your library. This session will explore how to identify resources and establish a process for developing a people leader program tailored to your organization’s needs, strategic goals, and while remaining mindful of budget constraints. The presenter will share observations from building an internal staff development program that supplements existing university resources.

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks discusses the importance of theorizing as a necessary act for hope and taking up more inclusive practices. Theorizing with communities means prompting dialogue with different people and groups to collectively make changes at the micro (personal) to macro (policy) levels at our libraries. When we take up leadership praxis (theory informed practice) with our communities using participatory methods, we ensure librarians are working with people. This closing keynote theorizes (with you) what hope and action means for library managers in practice.

Silvia Vong (PhD, M.Ed., MLIS) is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She is a former academic librarian of 15 years with experience as an administrator and middle management. Silvia’s research areas are related to management as well as the library as a workplace and now teaches a leadership course for future librarians.