Leadership and Academic Librarians

Citation

Morgan, S. (1999), "Leadership and Academic Librarians", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 8, pp. 413-424. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.8.413.12

Very few serious texts have been written on leadership within academic libraries although there have been a number of journal articles. Mech and McCabe’s 19 edited papers represent, therefore, a welcome excursion into this sometimes strange and psychological world. At various points contributors are at pains to stress the relationship between leadership and management since the two soon inevitably become entangled. This is probably most clearly summed up by Robison (p.202) who writes that “good management will see that a task is completed efficiently and effectively leadership provides the vision that led to the task”. And “this vision thing” is a concept that often crops up in the collection and lends it a positive, optimistic and forward‐looking air.

Divided into six parts, the first comprises a historical and evolutionary view of academic libraries and, almost as a case study, looks at the way in which control of book selection shifted from the faculty to the librarian in university research libraries. Part II concentrates on the visionary approach or transformational leadership. This includes the role of the university librarian within the wider campus and how best to fight their corner. Why – with political and entrepreneurial skills, of course. Further papers point out the importance of strategic planning to underpin the vision and also extol the virtues of empowerment (rather than carrot and stick) and treating people as persons (rather than pawns). The five papers in Part III address leadership roles in non‐management settings. These include how public services librarians build up campus relationships, leadership among instructional librarians, leading from within – apparently, the three areas providing the greatest leadership potential are collection management, user education and library technology. I found Part IV the most absorbing. Its trio of papers cover career advancement and leadership behaviour. What is the relationship between leadership and professional career patterns? How do academic library directors advance their careers given the goals and objectives of the late l990s? What happens to these people when they leave their directorships and find themselves facing an uncertain future? Part V’s contributions look at other academic settings and offer examples of librarians who have taken on leadership roles such as college presidency, associate provost for information services and other similar roles within academe. The suggestion is that preparation in librarianship enables you to be an academic generalist, encompassing a surprising amount of knowledge about a wide variety of academic disciplines. Interestingly, Chapter 18 discusses the implications of the number of students who choose librianship as a second career. The final chapter takes the form of a bibliographic essay which satisfactorily wraps up the collection with an impressive list of around 200 references. This is an excellent collection whose papers are well written and easy to read. Although almost exclusively covering the USA, the ideas and perceptions are easily transferred across geographical boundaries and provide plenty of food for thought for any senior academic library professional.