Reflection & Analysis

Overall, this course focused on management. I do not have sights on management necessarily; I enjoy being a team of 1 with a few volunteers when I need them and enjoy the "boots on the ground" work of resource center coordinating. The work of management, from someone who has only been an employee, has always seemed far too distant from the reality of a lot of the work that the employees and customer-facing librarians do. Through this course, I learned how wrong I was.

Management in the library space is a collaborative effort. Members of leadership and management teams work together with funding sources, community stakeholders, and library staff to create the spaces that we know and love. In this class, I learned of the ideas surrounding leadership and management and how the differences in these can make or break an organization. In this course, I appreciated the focus on leadership in varying settings; for example, I read an article about leadership in a school librarian capacity and then I interviewed a public library leader. To learn the differences in the goals and processes of managers of these different spaces was eye opening. In all cases, I noticed how leaders held space for others to bring in ideas and spoke with the people they served instead of just assuming.

This final project was a reflection of a semester's worth of work in learning what it takes to make a library function. Along with three other MLIS candidates, we interviewed library management, delved into library data, and we created a potential Strategic Plan for the Rudisill Library, the library branch where I work. As an employee, it was truly a learning experience to be able to go through the process of looking through data, determining the needs for the community, and working with other librarians to create a plan to fulfill that need.