Autistic Librarians in the Academic Library Hiring Process

Megan K. Friedel, assistant professor and lead archivist of University Libraries, discusses her involvement in the Society of American Archivists Archival

“I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age

This work provides information to members and prospective members of the law librarian profession on the status, rights, and responsibilities of academic law li

Building Psychological Safety in Academic Libraries: Fostering Innovation, Well-Being, and Engaged Teams

Inclusive Leadership: Perspectives From Academic Library Leaders

When Brigitte Weinsteiger became the vice provost and director of the Penn Libraries last year, she took the helm of what she characterizes as “one of the most consequential research libraries in the country.” With 19 libraries, 300-plus staff, a $95 million budget, and 10 million volumes across print and digital formats, she now leads an intellectual ecosystem that reaches across Penn’s campus and beyond.

Policies in academic libraries, whether formal or informal, external or internal, carry high levels of importance for the functioning of the library. …

Academic libraries' first and most fundamental obligation is to support the work of their host institutions.

This paper introduces a subfield of management studies, "critical management studies" (CMS) in order to rethink mainstream management practices in academic libraries, with strategic planning as an illustrative example. Mainstream management models from the corporate sector prioritize efficiency, productivity, and numerical measures for assessing impact. Academic libraries have generally borrowed uncritically from this mainstream management praxis, but how well does this serve our needs, especially when it comes to the most complex issues we face? CMS draws on critical theory to interrogate the methods and goals of mainstream management, with an emphasis on denaturalizing "taken for granted" practices and prioritizing ethics and worker equity. After providing a brief overview of the history and adoption of mainstream management in academic libraries, this paper focuses on strategic planning as an illustrative exploration of CMS principles in an academic library context. Strategic planning is a common managerial practice that has been embraced by academic libraries and generally modeled after mainstream approaches. Yet, CMS scholars contend that traditional strategic planning reproduces workplace inequities and universalizes managerial interests. In this article, I employ ideas from CMS to rethink library strategic planning by opening participation, reframing problems, and embracing our ethical agency.