Thinking and Leading with Generosity

One might think that generosity is a bit of an odd term to append to thinking and leading, especially within the library realm. Generous, in today’s parlance, is usually tied to money, and after all, librarians aren’t generally rich. However, if you look at the etymology of “generous”, it comes from Latin, meaning magnanimous or courageous. While, also from the Latin, it refers to noble birth, the etymology does not talk about money or giving.

The role of a library dean encompasses many things, some things pragmatic, some strategic, and some aspirational. Because the dean’s role is significantly larger than fits into a traditional “40 hour work week”, it can be tempting to focus just on those tasks and not think more broadly about the larger academic library world and the potential for doing transformative work. Transformative work, which I believe, most of us are interested in, takes a huge dose of generosity because it requires us to think and lead beyond our own capacities and institutions. Generosity is certainly more than money, but also includes a commitment of your time, intellectual capacity, and social and political capital.

For me, I tend to do my best generous or aspirational thinking when I am at a conference, often sitting in a keynote presentation or other program presentation. It is not that I’m not paying attention (ok, perhaps sometimes I’m not) but there is something about that venue that frees my mind to dream big and to look at my work challenges in a different way. I often come out of those sessions not only with new ideas from the speaker but also a slew of other ideas of things I want to try, or projects that could be transformative. Almost all of them will require being generous with time, money, and expertise.

Moving to the more pragmatic, here are a few suggestions on how to think and lead with generosity:

• Mentoring: One of the ways to be generous is to be a mentor for others. One of the great opportunities is to be a mentor for an American Library Association Spectrum Scholar. These new librarians of color are an exceptional group of individuals that will enrich your life, and also give you an opportunity to listen, to ask questions, and to share some of your expertise. If you’re not chosen to mentor one of the Spectrum scholars you can reach out to library directors and deans in your area to see if there are new librarians that might need a mentor.  

• Giving others a hand up: Throughout my career, others have been generous in providing opportunities for me to grow and they readily served as references when it was time for me to move on to new opportunities. The library dean’s role is to provide opportunities for growth and development for librarians and staff. This means even helping them develop expertise that you know they will eventually take elsewhere. It also means leveraging extra resources to help newer librarians get to conferences and participate in training. New professionals are at salary levels that usually don’t support their participation on their own and this is the time in their career they can especially benefit from these opportunities. Your generosity will be part of your contribution to the profession, and also build your reputation as a leader who really supports people’s career development. 

• Professional Development: While this is part of “giving others a hand up”, I call it out separately here to emphasize the importance of finding ways to generously support people for signature programs; these are things like ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians, Leading Change, ACRL Information Literacy Immersion, or Educause Management Institute. Programs like these are transformational for your people, and they make an impact on the library.

•  Participating up: One of the things I have learned over the past 30 plus years in the library world, is that no library or group of libraries has the perfect solution for every issue or problem that is encountered in the academic library world. I have spent the majority of my career in liberal arts colleges but have had some wonderful opportunities to work on projects with librarians from top research libraries. It could be easy to be intimidated but be generous to yourself: you have something to contribute. Two examples here might be helpful. In 2008, at a Coalition for Networked Information meeting, Dr. James Shulman, then President of Artstor, brought together a number of attendees to talk about the possibility of collaborating with Artstor, to create a digital image management system. While I was one of only a handful of liberal arts college library directors in the group, I jumped at the chance because it would be an opportunity to work with research libraries to build an interesting product that would be helpful to my library. In early 2009, the project coalesced around 8 partner libraries; Harvard, Yale, Cornell, NYU, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, University of Miami, Colby, and Middlebury; quite the group. For five years I attended quarterly steering committee meetings in NYC and regularly made contributions to the direction of the project. One of my key contributions was shaping the development of the project to be small and flexible enough for Colby while being able to scale large enough for Harvard.  Smaller libraries have expertise that they can contribute and need to be generous in contributing to groundbreaking projects. A second project grew out of my concern for how the libraries in Maine could collaborate to provide long-term stewardship for their print collections. An $821K IMLS National Leadership Grant and three years of work later, we had created a long-term retention strategy for monographs in Maine and were the first large scale print retention project to record retention commitments in OCLC’s WorldCat database. More importantly, we were able to share our experience and expertise with others. Our project was influential in the development of the Eastern Academic Scholars Trust, and also referenced in the University of California’s shared collections work.

• Reaching for the impossible: For me, one of the fun things to do is to dream big and look at those things that seem impossible, and then thinking about how we might make them happen. Thinking generously means being courageous and not let current funding, staffing, and other things to immediately shut down an idea. In 2009, at a lunch meeting with several local academic library directors in Central Maine, they suggested that there really needed to be a professional development day for academic libraries as the Maine Library Association was predominantly focused on public libraries. This seemingly casual suggestion prompted the “what if” question in my mind, followed quickly by “how, when, and where”. It seemed like an impossible idea, but I took a chance, spent some money, and in April 2009 launched Maine Academic Libraries Day. From a small beginning of about 65 attendees from about 8 or 9 institutions across the state in soon grew to an annual event with a national speaker and attendees from most of the academic libraries in the state. If you don’t reach for the sky, it remains out of reach.

•  Supporting others: One of the roles of a library dean is to encourage and support creativity and innovation. Some staff are primed and ready to go and just need the “OK” to proceed, while others might need some encouragement. Generosity plays a role here in a couple of ways. Some of those creative/innovative ideas need some small amounts of funding: others need the dean to be generous and let people explore new ideas to accomplish the mission and vision. Generosity also allows people to try and fail and get back up and try again. It is critical to allow front-line staff, who often have a very different perspective and understanding of the work and workflow issues, to provide input that shapes the work. Managers don’t have all the answers on process improvement.

• Doing the right thing: At the most recent Coalition for Networked Information meeting (April 8-9, 2019 in St Louis, MO), Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, gave a keynote address addressing the idea of generous thinking and reclaiming the university’s role in supporting the public good. (Check out her talk here). For me, the basic take away is that our universities, and our libraries, need to rethink how we work together to achieve what none of us can or should do on our own. In days of shrinking funds, it is even more important to be generous in supporting projects that enable us to create large scale projects that support scholarship for students, faculty, and the public.

• Align our budgets: Early in my career when personal computers were just getting established as a critical tool I remember visiting a university campus where the university provided a computer in every residence hall room. When asking how the university managed this, the library director who played a critical role in making this happen, said quite simply “you fund what you value”. This very simple but profound statement has stuck with me. We can all say we value print and digital collections. However, we also say we value collaboration with others, with professional development, with open source projects, with open access, with leading-edge technologies, yet when we look at the budget, it does not reflect these values. I think there is an opportunity to think generously on how we do transformative work to support our students and faculty and align our budget priorities to support it. 

None of this is easy; but it is necessary!