2013-2014

Nexus

Empowering leadership development in museums, archives, and libraries to strengthen the futures of these institutions and the communities they cultivate and serve.

There have been many efforts over the last two decades to train library leaders through workshops, seminars, institutes, and fellows programs. The outcomes of these training efforts have varied. Studies conducted by CLIR and InfoPeople show that while some of these efforts may be working, they do not yet meet the breadth and depth of the demand within the field. Also, there has been little consistency to date in curriculum development and evaluation practices across these leadership-training programs.

While individual training programs have often documented their work through white papers and articles, there is a relative lack of comparison-based documentation regarding the breadth and depth of this existing spectrum of leadership-training activities, especially across library sectors (academic, public, government, private, archival). Nexus addresses the need for documentation of existing practices, cross-germination across leadership training groups, and the creation of a strong, extensible foundation to train and evaluate boundary-spanning leaders for the 21st century library field.


Project Outputs:

  1. Library Leadership Roadmap and Logic Model, published 30 September 2014
  2. Nexus Recommendations for Action, published 27 August 2014
  3. Leadership Development Impact Assessment, published 23 June 2014
  4. Training the 21st Century Library Leader Report, published 6 April 2014
  5. Training the 21st Century Library Leader Dataset, published 1 April 2014

Project Partners:

  • ALA, Public Program Office – Mary Davis Fournier, Mary Hirsch
  • Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) – Mary Ellen Davis, Kathryn Deiss
  • Association of Research Libraries (ARL) – Mark Puente
  • Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) – Shera Clark, Karen Dyer, David Horth
  • Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) – Cal Shepard
  • Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) – Joan Lippincott
  • Council of State Archivists (CoSA) – Anne Ackerson
  • Dartmouth College – David Seaman
  • Illinois State Library ILEAD U – Anne Craig, Joe Natale
  • National Library of Medicine (NLM/AAHSL) – Carol Jenkins
  • Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) – Chrystie Hill
  • Public Library Association (PLA) – Barb Macikas, Deborah Robertson
  • University of North Texas (UNT) – Martin Halbert
  • Virginia Tech Libraries – Tyler Walters