I’m standing for election to the ALIA Board of Directors.
I hadn’t initially thought I’d nominate in 2024. I am, however, thankful to the two incredible library leaders who reached out and asked about my ALIA Board intentions for this year. Thank you.
There’s only so much space for candidates to detail what they bring to the Board, but I find value in thinking through motivations. So, here we are.
What do I stand for and why?
Inclusive leadership | Anticipating barriers | Future directions
1. Inclusive leadership & governance
I’m passionate about ensuring inclusive and authentic leadership in the library profession extends to boards and decision-making processes.
Positively, we see a lot of conversations about belonging, cultural safety, equity, inclusion, and diversity for libraries and professionals. Yet, we also consistently see voices that can provide value to our profession, collections, services, and communities being neglected or disregarded.
This should make us uncomfortable, but I don’t think it does to the extent we need it to.
In my work co-founding and chairing the Association of Neurodivergent and Disabled GLAMR Professionals Australia (ANDPA) with my colleague Nikki Andersen, it was immensely clear that we have a long way to go.
Asking the right questions revealed that there were gaps where we could collectively do better as a profession. ANDPA’s values and objectives are a direct response to a need for visible community, inclusive networking, and representation. These gaps required a new approach and perspective, with awareness of concerns related to safety and trust, to effectively serve members and provide value.
As someone who cares about inclusivity and creating positive change, I’m motivated to ensure our national initiatives go beyond conversation and are deliberate in striving for inclusive leadership to further empower our profession.
Nikki writes about her experience entering the library workforce, experiencing silence and invisibility when it came to the representation of disability in the profession and feeling like she didn’t belong. Nikki maintains:
“We need to understand the needs and aspirations of all members of our communities and include their voices and perspectives in decision-making processes and library services. This is because libraries serve diverse communities.” 1
So much of Nikki’s writing resonates with me. I was nodding the entire time I reviewed an early draft, having seen and experienced the impact that exclusionary ideals can have and having asked similar questions on risk, opportunity, and disclosure.
It takes people being open and honest to bring the cost and impact of this to light. While this shouldn’t always have to be the case, I’m grateful to have a colleague and friend who shares my passion for positive change and not wanting others to experience the same barriers.
Without the presence of lived experience networks and influence, boards risk missing critical and on-the-ground knowledge from the members and communities they serve.
Lived experience networks and expertise facilitate new insights and questions, demonstrate a commitment to the diversity many candidates and members call for, and ensure we have representation in decision-making that impacts members and, ultimately, library service users.
We’re incredibly well-positioned to focus on developing inclusive leadership capabilities and futures in our profession. I’m excited about this, but we also need to engage different voices in our decision-making who can translate community needs into our governance and strategic directions.
ALIA Board candidature statements always call for strengthening the diversity of ALIA’s membership and the LIS workforce. This is positive. Ideally, though, we can see the diversity of membership also translate to the Board and continue to strengthen this in visible ways.
Last year, I was a recipient of a Disability Leadership Scholarship from the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) and the Australian Disability Network and I completed the AICD’s Foundations of Directorship course. 2 My application required addressing leadership and community impact and barriers to participation.
While difficult to write and reflect on, it highlighted the value lived experience can bring to governance and decision-making processes. It allowed me to reflect on how my lived experience with disability and being part of the LGBTIQA+ community drive my passion for authentic leadership and inclusion.
The importance of diverse board compositions for strong decision-making, governance, and strategic oversight remains evident.
We’re a vibrant and tenacious profession.
At a national level, we need the benefit of new insights and perspectives to support our Association’s sustainability in evolving social landscapes and contemporary governance contexts.
So, I’m standing for inclusive and impactful leadership that brings positive change to individuals, communities, and organisations.
2. Anticipating barriers
Anyone who has worked closely with me knows I’m incredibly passionate about professional development. I’m pretty sure my eyes light up when talking about it.
Strengthening our professional capabilities requires understanding and anticipating professional barriers. I see this anticipation as part of inclusive and reflexive leadership.
While reflection is thinking through our thought processes, who we are, our motivations, the experiences we bring, gaps we’ve missed, and the context surrounding our decisions, being reflexive is critically examining the impact and influence these have on others. 3
In the 2016 ALIA Board election, the New Generation Advisory Committee (NGAC) asked candidates questions specific to students and new graduates (also done in other years).
As always, there was a lot of great practical advice, but this often overshadowed the bigger picture, frequently glossed over. Only four of the twelve responding candidates recognised the barriers that new graduates might face beyond the individual. These were my favourite responses because they were insightful and showed preparedness to critically examine the challenges of our profession in a forward-thinking way.
Those candidates were the ones who recognised they did not have all the answers and that there weren’t easy answers. Yet, they were reflexive enough to consider their positionality. In doing so, they demonstrated strategic insight, empathy, social awareness, and a grasp of our profession that went beyond themselves.
Problem-solving starts with problem-defining, and means identifying gaps and barriers outside of our own experiences, and situating these within the bigger picture, rather than fixating on individual processes.
While there has been improvement in understanding barriers, historically, this has not been a priority in LIS diversity strategies. 4 We have incredible potential in this space, and I’m excited to see the direction we take it. To date, however, national LIS workforce diversity initiatives, trends, and outcomes have been defined narrowly. We would benefit from clear strategies that acknowledge disparities and intersectionality (beyond a surface-level understanding).
If we want to develop and mentor professionals, we need to acknowledge the barriers faced, anticipate these in decision-making processes, and translate them into the direction of member services. This needs to inform professional development, mentoring, and training provisions to continue to strengthen ALIA’s member value and engagement.
Moreso, this applies beyond new graduate cohorts. We have opportunities to ensure we’re not leaving groups behind and that we can represent the communities we partner with.
3. Future directions
I’m ambitious for LIS futures.
If I didn’t realise our potential for value and impact, I wouldn’t be tackling a PhD on the role of libraries across diplomacy, open scholarship, climate change, and policy action. 5
My research has touched on the agency libraries have and critically explores their capacity to influence at national and international levels. This has implications for policy and partnerships, particularly when it comes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
I see evolving information and social landscapes as key drivers in developing our professional capabilities and partnerships. We can actively engage in social landscapes – partnering and co-designing across boundaries – and, in the process, transform our practices. Doing this can support value creation for communities, irrespective of the library sectors we each belong to.
Whether the evolutions of landscapes relate to sustainable development, emerging technologies, education, or other local or social dynamics, our responses should be reflexive and impactful. This requires critical engagement, anticipating challenges, and new perspectives.
Having led projects mapping library activities to the SDGs, brought expertise to library assessment activities as part of evidence based practice, and undertaken interdisciplinary research on libraries in international relations, I bring a both practical and critical grasp of where our advocacy can be strengthened.
We’re working towards inclusive, sustainable, and equitable futures, and we can ensure libraries remain partners that bring positive change with a willingness to transform our practices.
Positive change can mean asking questions even of things accepted as conceivably good. Doing so creates accountability and presents opportunities to realise strategic potential and social impact.
To borrow from scholarship on evidence-based practice in libraries:
“… librarians must acknowledge that uncertainty is acceptable and that questioning practice is a healthy part of growth …”. 6
I’m looking forward to continuing to be part of bringing positive change and would love your support to do so when voting opens on 26th February.
- (Anderson, 2024) ↩︎
- AICD, Foundations of Directorship ↩︎
- See: ‘A Note on Reflexivity and Positionality‘ in Practicing and Presenting Social Research. ↩︎
- Currently, ALIA’s SDGs Baseline Report (p.7) reflects an intention to continue tracking workforce diversity by re-conducting the 2019 trend report but doesn’t doesn’t indicate any difference in strategy or evidence. ↩︎
- Broadly. ↩︎
- (Jacobs & Koufogiannakis, 2014) ↩︎