Think Globally, Act Locally: A Library Perspective

If you would have told me eighteen months ago that I would be a library director in the Middle East, I would have thought you had a wild imagination. But such an opportunity did arise, and I am currently “on loan” from Northwestern University (NU) to our campus library in Doha, Qatar. Last winter, I spent three months in Doha as a temporary solution to a staffing challenge. It soon became clear that my return there for two years would benefit not only the operations and developing services of the Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q)¹ library but also collaboration and communication with the home campus and the university’s supporting activities. Fortunately, the dean of libraries in Evanston and the dean of NU-Q both enthusiastically supported this plan and its potential value to the libraries on both sides of the world. Now that I am a bit more than six months into the two-year commitment, I reflect on how enriching this experience is to me personally and professionally. In particular, I have learned firsthand how important global exposure can be to a library professional’s attaining a deeper and wider level of international awareness. I have thought about what I now perceive as the relatively narrow US-centric point of view I held in the past and how my outlook and perspective are evolving. It is too early to know, or even to speculate, how the experiences of these two years will affect my views and attitudes after I return to Evanston in 2016, but I am confident they will be far different and more expansive, and that I will be more understanding and conscious of the contexts and cultural aspects of academic libraries operating outside the United States.

Although I would not have believed that such an opportunity would present itself before it did, it really should not have been a surprise given the globalization of higher education broadly and the impressive scale at which NU embraces international thinking and initiatives. The best term for the operationalization of activities related to both globalization and internationalization is probably “global engagement,” which connotes active participation in a wide range of endeavor. Global engagement or some similar term is likely found in a strategic plan document, on the letterhead of an office, or in some other tangible manifestation on most US campuses. Just as likely, it is found in more than one of these places. Ubiquity often renders a phrase or concept so tired that it loses its importance and relevance to what it represents, but this has not happened for the globalization of higher education, nor does it seem likely for the near- or the long-term future. In several ways, NU offers compelling rhetoric, actions, and aspirations related to global engagement, including policy documents, names of prominent offices, and descriptive website information. Global engagement is even one of the four pillars of the university’s strategic plan, ““NorthWEstern WILL,”² that is guiding the course of the institution and therefore of the libraries for the next few years. This language and emphasis naturally carry over to the library’s strategic plan, as well as to its annual departmental and individual librarians’ goals.

Also important to global engagement is Northwestern’s presence in Qatar. NU-Q operates in an area on the outskirts of Doha called Education City, an educational district supported by a semiprivate foundation. Education City has research centers and educational institutions ranging from preschool to branch campuses of some of the world’s elite universities. Students there can enroll in a variety of degree programs, including computer science and business at Carnegie Mellon University, international affairs at Georgetown, engineering at Texas A & M, and journalism and communication at NU-Q. Qatar is Northwestern’s first international campus and an experience replicated and shared by other universities in Education City and elsewhere in the Middle East, Asia, and beyond. This positioning raises the institution’s global profile and, more tangibly, affords Northwestern the opportunity to serve a vital role in the transition of a country and region. Qatar’s strategic vision...