Developing Tomorrow's Library Leaders

One of the hallmarks of the professions is the commitment to, if not the requirement for, continuing education. This is as true of librarianship as it is of medicine, the law, or teaching. In fact, the American Library Association is on record as saying that:

Education and Continuous Learning is one of five key action areas adopted by the American Library Association to fulfill its mission of promoting the highest quality library and information services for all people . . . For librarians, continuous learning is critical to renewing the expertise and skills needed to teach and assist members of the public in the new information age.¹

Continuing education encompasses a spectrum of possible activities, including workshops, credit-granting classes, professional development programs, leadership development programs, and training—or (shudder) "trainings." Any of these can be certificated, or not; and, increasingly, many take place online, in whole or in part.

While professional and leadership development are often considered interchangeable, they are actually different—at least in their focus and intent. Professional development is learning intended to help one earn or maintain professional credentials, while leadership development is the acquisition of skills and knowledge to expand one's capacity and capability for performing in leadership roles within organizations.² In what follows, I will consider the latter.

One of the first post-master of library science (MLS) development efforts of the modern era was launched in 1968 by the Council on Library Resources (CLR): the CLR Fellows program. While one can debate the point, I consider it to have been professional development, not leadership development. The following description, extracted from the College & Research Libraries News announcement of the eighth cohort in 1976, supports this view: "Each fellow will spend three months or more pursuing a self-developed study project, aimed at improving his or her competence in the substantive, administrative, or technical aspects of librarianship."³

This language is much like that used to describe what is arguably the program's follow-on nearly four decades later, the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program that CLIR⁴ began in 2004: "Fellows work on projects that forge and strengthen connections among collections, educational technologies, and current research."⁵ The program lists leadership first among its core goals, followed by awareness, changing roles, relevant resources, and young scholars.⁶ Nevertheless, its focus strikes me as one of professional development, rather than leadership development.

In 1982, Robert Hayes, dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), launched the longest-standing leadership development program in librarianship, Senior Fellows. Following my retirement from UC San Diego in 2017, I was appointed director of that program. I shall describe it in greater detail following this brief overview of cognate programs.

In the mid-1990s, CLR and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, helped launch the Digital Leadership Institute, which rapidly matured in 1999 into the Frye Leadership Institute. Named for the former chancellor of Emory—Billy E. Frye—and cohosted by Emory, CLIR, and EDUCAUSE, the mission of the Frye Institute was to "provide continuing education opportunities for individuals who currently hold, or will one day assume, positions that make them responsible for transforming the management of scholarly information in the higher education community."⁷ The two-week, annual, Emory-based program continued as such through the first decade of the 2000s, until it evolved again and emerged in 2012 as the Leading Change Institute (LCI). As its name indicates, the latter's remit is more narrowly focused on change leadership and is specifically "designed for leaders in higher education, including CIOs, librarians, information technology professionals, and administrators, who are interested in working collaboratively to promote and initiate change on critical issues affecting the academy."⁸ With that evolution, the institute also moved to Washington, D.C., and reduced its on-site component from two weeks to one.

Launched in 1999, the Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians is a collaboration between the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This weeklong on-site offering is intended to help "college-level librarians and...