The hope and aspiration of every serious academic library director are to effectively lead the library and adequately ensure that the perceived value of the library to the academic institution and its relationship to the rest of the community are maintained. The libraries effectiveness in the institutional environment rests, to a larger extent, on the effectiveness of the library’s director. The academic library director, therefore, needs special leadership skills to enable them to develop and build relationships with all key stakeholders so that they can inform the scholarly communities on current issues to improve teaching and research. But the effective application of the necessary competencies and skills required to achieve this success do not come to us naturally. They have to be learned and practiced. Library directors, therefore, seek ways to acquire the skills and knowledge that can enable them to be successful academic library leaders amid challenges.
Some of the common challenges that can overwhelm the academic library director include, how to navigate the institutional culture in order to communicate the various changes in the library effectively to other members of the institution. There is also the challenge of developing effective collaboration between the library and other sections of the institution; how to develop and implement effective strategies to judiciously use limited resources to achieve organisational goals; and how to build effective safety and surety protocols in the library just to mention a few. To overcome these challenges and many others, Colleen S Harris’ edited ‘So you want to be an Academic Library director’ is a must read for everyone who is or aspire to be a successful academic librarian in any institution.
The book is a gamut of strategies for the academic library director’s success. It is very concise (just 128 pages) but full of thought-provoking and practical discussions that can easily be applied to any context. Each of the 13 chapters is taken by an expert to discuss a specific aspect of the various elements that can help one to become a successful academic library director. Starting from how to navigate institutional culture, through iterative strategic planning to facilities for the director, library safety and security to how to reframe community relation and the skills for success in dealing with diversity programming at academic libraries. These topics are discussed by current academic library directors, library managers, deans of library services and educational technologists from highly reputable academic institutions across the globe and their experiences provide useful examples to richly support the discussions in the various chapters. Colleen S. Harris’s own rich experience as an information literacy researcher, coordinator and assistant librarian for many years in various contexts has been effectively been used to edit the content to make it easy to read, understand and apply. If you really want to be a successful academic library director, you need to read this book.