Nexus: Leading Across Boundaries

The Nexus “Leading Across Boundaries” (LAB) initiative, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and hosted by the Educopia Institute, is a federated, national effort involving a wide range of leadership training stakeholders from the archives, museum, and library communities. Together, we document existing practices and needed competencies, build cross-germination tools and strategies, and develop open, freely available curriculum and evaluation tools for use across these fields. Our goal is to create a strong, extensible foundation to train and evaluate boundary-spanning leaders in archives, libraries, and museums.

The Nexus offerings are designed to be customizable to fit a wide variety of continuing education and professional development environments, from conference workshops to graduate classrooms to large-scale leadership development programs for professionals. We encourage hosts and trainers to freely adopt and adapt the materials to best fit their programmatic needs.

Project Outputs:

Layers of Leadership, published October 2017
- A detailed chart of high-demand leadership training skills and competencies, structured according to leadership roles (e.g., “Leading Self,” “Leading Others,” “Leading the Dept.,” etc.).
Core Curriculum, published 5 September 2018
- Seven freely available leadership curriculum modules, all aimed at “Leading the Profession.” These are flexible and customizable and include slides, detailed facilitator notes, and activities.
Evaluation Framework and Instrument, published 15 November 2017
- This validated framework ties directly to the “Layers of Leadership” competencies and provides a common core for evaluating the impacts of leadership training.

2014-2017

Nexus: Leading Across Boundaries

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