Help Your Library Succeed and Thrive

Steering an academic library comes with numerous challenges, from strategic planning, to building engagement, to ensuring safe spaces for the libraries' diverse users. In this unpredictable landscape, it is even more important that librarians are equipped with the latest insights and strategies to help bolster their leadership and navigate through the uncertainties.

Alex Hodges, director of HGSE's Gutman Library and faculty chair of professional education program, Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians, discusses some of the unique challenges facing academic librarians today and how they can better position their libraries to meet current and future challenges.

What are the biggest challenges facing today’s academic librarians?
Every academic librarian or archivist faces numerous external and internal pressures. These pressures likely establish what those challenges (and opportunities) might be. For the library I serve, I believe our core challenges are budget forecasting, strategic planning, and ongoing digital transformation. Many librarians and archivists may face similar issues.

Academic library professionals face many other challenges across the field. They include inclusivity and accessibility, generational change, organizational culture, dis-/misinformation, return-to-campus mandates, leadership churn, the corporatization of higher ed, privacy, academic freedom, campus safety, staff engagement, artificial intelligence, and supporting mental health. The list goes on…

What role do academic librarians play in the drive for equity, inclusion, and racial justice on campus and beyond?
Justice requires guarding and cataloging underrepresented voices so that they are discoverable. In their communities and on their campuses, academic librarians, archivists, cultural heritage professionals, and support staff play major roles in the drive for equity, inclusion, and racial justice actions.

Speaking for myself, I aim to create safe third places in our community. A library, museum, gallery, or archive is a third place where library users have access to diverse curated collections. They are spaces that hold and display the histories that should not be forgotten or ignored. These learning and teaching spaces help to amplify factual research, data, and truths. The workers inside these spaces welcome their communities to have equal access to information, attend lectures, view art, create new knowledge, and promote open dialogue.

How can effective professional development help academic librarians better prepare to address current and future institutional challenges?
A professional development institute first and foremost must help build community among its participants. In Harvard’s Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians, participants use discussions and activities to expand and strengthen their career connections and growth. By analyzing case studies and engaging in small- and whole-group processing exercises, participants learn methods to cope with change management, burnout, institutional trauma, moral and civic dilemmas, and how to build culturally responsive organizations. These practice-focused activities are meant to decrease dysfunction in order to embrace and lead organizational change, deep care, and innovation.