
2014-2017
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.
Project Partners:
- Academy of Certified Archivists (ACA)
- ALA, Public Program Office
- American Association for State and Local History (AASLH)
- Archives Leadership Institute (ALI)
- Association of Academic Health Science Libraries (AAHSL)
- Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG)
- Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
- Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
- Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA)
- Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)
- Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA)
- Cooperstown Graduate Program
- Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
- Council of State Archivists (CoSA)
- Getty Leadership Institute
- Illinois State Library ILEAD U
- Institute for Cultural Entrepreneurship (ICE)
- Ithaka S&R; Johns Hopkins Museum Studies Program
- Library Leadership & Management Association (LLAMA)
- Lyndhurst Group, LLC
- Maureen Sullivan Associates
- Medical Library Association (MLA)
- Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM)
- Mountain-Plains Museums Association (MPMA)
- National Library of Medicine (NLM)
- Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)
- Public Library Association (PLA)
- Regional Archival Associations Consortium (RAAC)
- Society of American Archivists (SAA)
- Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC)
- Syracuse University
- Toolkit Consulting
- TrueBearing Consulting
- University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill SILS
- University of North Texas (UNT)
- Virginia Tech Libraries