Effective management in academic libraries requires more than oversight and decision-making: it calls for leadership that centers people, relationships, and trust. As higher education continues to evolve, library managers are tasked with guiding teams through uncertainty while sustaining motivation, engagement, and well-being. This session explores how leaders can intentionally cultivate a person-centered culture that supports both individual growth and organizational resilience.
At EKU Libraries, we recognized that in order to ensure the library remains relevant amidst shifting institutional priorities and shrinking budgets, we first needed to strengthen how we worked together. By focusing on psychological safety, transparent communication, and shared purpose, we fostered an environment that encouraged learning, experimentation, and adaptability. Drawing on Edgar Schein’s stages of learning and change, we’ll discuss how our management practices evolved to support staff as they navigated this uncertain territory.
Participants will gain practical strategies for leading through change while maintaining a culture of care. We will share examples of how reframing resistance, promoting collaboration, and aligning daily work with institutional goals helped us strengthen both our team and our impact. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for supporting staff well-being, enhancing communication, and embedding empathy into management practices—tools that empower leaders at all levels to create sustainable, people-focused change within their organizations.
Our university licensed enterprise access to Claude in April 2025, which placed new pressure on the library to be ready to address AI in Fall 2025. As unit leads, we wanted our staff to feel confident addressing GenAI in library instruction, so we undertook two separate approaches to building engagement with AI based on our groups’ working cultures and needs.
The STEM team took a discussion-based approach. Academic departments had adopted GenAI in different ways, and thus liaisons had uneven skill levels using AI tools. This encouraged us to consider an alternative to a group upskilling approach. Our goal was for liaisons to feel confident addressing AI questions from faculty or students on the spot in the classroom. Meetings centered around creating a graph that documented acceptable/unacceptable and effective/ineffective uses. Meeting topics included Northeastern’s AI policies, available AI tools, deep research modes, student attitudes towards AI, communication, and more.
The generalist group of online learning librarians took a competencies-based approach. The unit head developed an initial list of objectives addressing what the team should be able to do or speak about related to GenAI in the context of open workshops or tutorials, which was edited and collectively approved by the group. Our competencies outline focused on explaining how GenAI worked, why it was error-prone, evaluating its output, and using enterprise AI tools.
Both managers will share how their teams responded to these approaches, strategies for staying current with AI developments, and key lessons learned.
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.
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.
