Conference on Academic Library Management 2026

Rooted in the lived experiences of the presenters – a neurodivergent employee and their manager, this session provides an authentic dialogue about how working through the process of accommodations shaped personal and professional relationships and well-being.

This dialogue-style presentation will provide tips and advice, practical tools, and learnings from failures related to the following themes:

- Advocacy & relationship building

- Communication & transparency

- Fostering well-being

- Navigating Challenges

- Supervision & evaluation

- Managing up & sideways

- Organizational culture/climate

This case study offers practical recommendations for creating neurodiversity-friendly workplaces in academic libraries and beyond. It also invites attendees to reconsider the narrative of accommodation as a solitary journey. Instead, it underscores the transformative power of teamwork and dialogue in fostering a truly accessible and equitable workplace.

By sharing our story, we hope to contribute to a broader understanding of neurodiversity in the workplace and inspire others to embrace accessibility as a collective effort.

Our department has gone through several changes, leaving colleagues split between two campuses. Trying to facilitate collaboration and create a unified sense of community was a critical need. To address this, we created a goal for everyone to share their expertise. This presentation details the design, implementation, and outcomes of our department's in-house professional development (PD) model, where each person developed and led a session for their colleagues. This approach shifts PD from a passive, top-down mandate to an active, collaborative, and person-centered management strategy. Specifically, the model fostered community by creating structured, positive interactions that bridged our two campuses and established a shared vulnerability and commitment to growth among colleagues.

This presentation will explain how this model addresses core tenets of person-centered management, specifically fostering autonomy, recognizing individual expertise, and promoting holistic skill development, by turning every colleague into both a learner and an educator. The session will cover the practical steps for implementation, the challenges encountered, and results demonstrating increased employee engagement, skill transfer, and a stronger sense of departmental community, collective ownership, and a unified professional identity.

Using a trauma-informed framework, we will explore ways to help student workers develop empathy and self-awareness and build a workplace culture of collaboration and inclusion.

What can you do when a student employee is offended by something a co-worker said at the circulation desk? What policies can mitigate the problem of excessive profanity in public services? These questions may seem simple to solve - say “stop it,” and move on - but these issues portend a more complicated problem. Student employees may have had no prior work experience and when problems in workplace culture arise, it offers an opportunity for teaching emotional intelligence skills that will help them in future professional settings. The session will use Rebecca Tolley’s Six Guiding Principles of Trauma-Informed Approaches - safety, transparency, peer support, collaboration, empowerment and culture - to frame a discussion of intentional learning experiences for student employees that can lead to retention, academic success and self-discovery.

In this workshop, we will brainstorm ways to:

- Use a trauma-informed approach to build a safe, collaborative workplace environment

- Integrate emotional intelligence skills training into a student employment program

- Give feedback to students that results in better performance and concrete action steps

The essential activity of recruiting and hiring can be fraught with high levels of stress, anxiety, impersonal formality, and the possibility that anyone involved may dread the unfeeling cold of distant scrutiny and fierce competition. While multiple factors can contribute to discomfort and disconnection, the presenters advocate for an approach that eschews even an accidental running of the gauntlet in favor of interview experiences that intentionally center the whole person. The whole-person approach to hiring both embraces the logistical and legal requirements overseen by Human Resources and incorporates person-centered strategies and when applied across each element in recruitment and hiring, help reduce unnecessary fear or intimidation. By personalizing experiences and applying thoughtful consideration to the holistic experience of each candidate, an organization can invest in their ability to bring their best self to each interaction. This has the potential to make way for a clearer understanding of the expertise, experience, and vision that an individual offers to an organization, and in return, convey what the workplace community offers to prospective colleagues. The presenters—who have served as hiring managers, search committee chairs, and search committee members for a variety of faculty librarian roles— will share why they’ve moved to this approach and what they have learned in three years of refining their whole-person practice. Attendees will receive a foundational understanding of the whole-person approach, including benefits, challenges, and specific, practical strategies for incorporating this philosophy into any hiring opportunity.

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.