Last Updated on April 29, 2025, 10:12 am ET
Dean Judy Russell will step down from her position in July 2025 after leading the University of Florida (UF) George A. Smathers Libraries for 18 years. Read our interview with her about her career and the profession below.
Katherine: I’d love to hear how you got started in librarianship.
Judy: I first started working in libraries in eighth grade. I transferred to a new school and had a homeroom where I was seated in the back row. A few days in, the homeroom teacher passed out a form for people to sign up for clubs. My mother had a mantra her entire life: “Never volunteer for anything.” I sat with my hands carefully folded in my lap, but they sent an extra paper down the aisle. I’m a compulsive reader, so once it was in front of me, I read it. One of the options was the library, which I checked.
I worked in libraries from my school libraries all the way through high school and college, and went straight from college to library school. So did my career begin when I graduated with my master’s? Or did it begin in eighth grade? I don’t know. But to me that’s the beginning of the story.
The summer between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, I had a summer job at the Graduate School Chemistry Library at Georgetown University. They were moving the library when they first built their Science Library, consolidating all these departmental libraries. Thank God, they didn’t expect me to know chemistry! The real issue was organizing the library for moving and supervising the packing.
The trauma of it, which I’ve never escaped, was they didn’t really plan it out. I’ve moved a lot of libraries since then, and you’ve got to have a total floor plan and know where everything is going. They hadn’t gathered information about how many linear feet from this and that, and where it was going to go. When the books were delivered, they discovered they didn’t have enough boxes and ended up dumping many of the books on the floor so they could reuse the boxes. Young as I was, I was absolutely horrified. This was the perfect lesson of how not to do this. That was my first paid library job.
I had jobs in special libraries every summer while I was in college, and continued to work in special libraries while in graduate school. I got called into the dean’s office when he learned I was working nearly full time. He told me I would not be able to keep up with the curriculum and needed to quit my job. I smiled sweetly and kept right on working.
My first job after earning my master’s degree was at the Communications Satellite Corporation at their R&D lab. In a sense, though I didn’t realize it at the time, that experience with a research library was really instrumental in shaping my philosophy about the way a research library conducts itself. They did not view the library as overhead or an administrative expense. We were equated to a valuable piece of lab equipment—that was exactly how they viewed the library. In so many places libraries are considered overhead and are among the first things to get cut, but not at the labs.
I wrote an article for the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS), before it merged with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), which traces the building blocks of my career path, “Celebrating Serendipity and Collaboration: (NFAIS Miles Conrad Memorial Lecture, February 27, 2017).”
Katherine: I’d love to hear some of the highlights of your career.
Judy: I have been really fortunate to be in interesting places at interesting times. I was at GPO when the legislation passed creating GPO Access, and I implemented it. I set up the office of electronic information dissemination at GPO. I sent out the first electronic document ever distributed by GPO.
I managed the depository program through that transition. The last policy document we published before I left was about moving toward a more electronic depository program. At that point, we were about 10 percent electronic and 90 percent print or other tangible media. We forecast that in 10 years it would flip, and oddly enough, in 10 years it had flipped to 90 percent electronic.
One of my favorite stories from that time: While I was at GPO, the PDF file format was invented, and Adobe came to us to see whether GPO would use it. I ended up going to a number of conventions with them, talking about how we were using PDF files at GPO. Originally, GPO was offering ASCII text files on GPO Access, but for both the Congressional Record and the Federal Register, the font and page layout conveyed a lot of meaning. What people really wanted was to see the printed page. When you go to advice and consent, or the revised remarks in the Record, it’s in a different font so you know that’s not what was said on the floor. You can’t see that in ASCII text.
The PDF files allowed us to start delivering text that looked like the printed page, and that really transformed the popularity and utility of electronic government information.
Katherine: Could you talk about some goals you set that maybe you haven’t quite reached?
Judy: When I arrived here and interviewed, I identified the fact that we had a small off-site storage facility, but we needed a much larger one. I proposed to the provost in my first interview that we seek funding to build a high-density storage facility, and knowing it would be hard to get legislative funding, that we set it up to serve the entire State University System of Florida and to accept low-use materials from the system.
We worked on it for a number of years. We got very close to getting the funding in a couple of appropriation cycles. We got the funding to do the planning, so we had shovel-ready plans, but we never got the funding to build it. If you look at my organization chart online, there’s a dotted-line box that says “high density storage facility.”
We ended up renting space instead. We have one building that the university owns, and another one we’ve rented. We have 2.2 million volumes off campus, but we could move much more off campus and free more of the high-rent on campus space for other uses if we had the high-density storage facility.
We also had a plan eight years ago to replace the colonnade in front of Library West that faces onto the Plaza of the Americas. We raised funds and had a design to build one that would architecturally resemble the building it sits in front of. It would have extended further into the plaza with multiple outdoor seating areas, Wi-Fi, solar power, and lights so people could stay outside after dark. In our climate, there’s so much of the year you could be outside.
The whole colonnade was only about $2 million at that point. But we never found the donor who would put up the money to have their name on it. We’re in the process now of doing some refurbishing of the existing colonnade instead.
Katherine: What advice might you have for those who aspire to leadership within research libraries?
Judy: I’ve both directly and indirectly mentored a lot of people during my time here—I have a mentee right now who is from the most recent fellows class. Knowing when to speak up and having the courage to speak up—that’s one of the things that has helped me be successful here. I’m willing to take an issue, run with it, try to find allies, and try to get something done.
Asking a lot of questions is important. One of the criticisms about everything that’s going on right now in Washington—and it’s happening in Florida too—is actions are being taken without thought, and care, and analysis. Coming in new and not having been in academic libraries before, I had a million questions. I asked a lot of questions and learned from what I asked before I started trying to change things, and by the time I needed to reorganize, there were good reasons, and I had worked with people who had been here a long time to understand the options.
I feel like I have a really strong leadership team, and part of that strength is that they’re willing to argue with me. They’ll say, “No, I don’t think we should do it that way,” or “Here’s another way.” Sometimes we end up with my decision, sometimes with theirs, but they’re better decisions because of that listening, learning, and collaborating.
Katherine: What are your thoughts on the key issues that research libraries will face in the next five years or so?
Judy: Budget is always an issue, but not like this. This is really extreme. We just had a budget meeting yesterday where they said the budget issues happening today at the state and federal level will take us a minimum of three to four years to recover from.
I’m hearing from a lot of colleagues that they’re being asked to plan for 5 or 10 percent budget cuts. We’re beginning to get guidance that we need to have these plans and be able to lay out what we would do and the consequences if we implement them.
Everyone is expecting a massive reduction in the indirect cost rates with the new fiscal year, and that’s not very much time to regroup and rethink. Some deans are saying they have grants that have already been canceled, with graduate students on the payroll that they now don’t have the income to pay. All three of the libraries’ federal grants (two with IMLS and one with NEH) have been canceled.
We’re going to have very tough financial times. Is the research library viewed as an easy place to make cuts? I don’t think so, not here. There’s an understanding of how valuable the library is to recruiting, retaining, and educating graduate students, and how we support the research enterprise. But when the cuts get this bad, it’s not going to be easy to protect anything, including the libraries
We talk a lot about what we’re willing to stop doing. It’s really hard to stop doing things—it tends to always be “Let’s pile on more”—but we’re going to have to make some hard decisions about what we can afford to do and what we can’t.
We’re also going to continue to have challenges around freedom of speech. We get laws and directives that are vague enough but stringent, and then we overcorrect. We start policing ourselves out of fear.
Katherine: What inspires you about librarianship?
Judy: It’s such a service profession, and there’s the ability to do many things that have such an impact on other people. I’ve met some of the most amazing people and had a chance to really get to know them.
Even the little things you do help—I’ll tell you a sweet story. A colleague contacted me for help finding an article. It turned out the magazine was in storage, and we were able to retrieve it. Her father was gay and his long-term partner had written an article about how they met that was published in a magazine for gay men. Her dad died a number of years ago. We found the article, scanned it, and then the librarian who was working with me found the magazine on eBay. I bought it, and we gave it to her. She sent it to her father’s partner as a Father’s Day present—she was in tears over this and so were we!
She gave us a gift card to thank us, so we went to a local bookstore and used the gift card to acquire materials that now have a book plate indicating that they are a donation from her in honor of her father and his partner.
Why wouldn’t you want to do this job? This is one small story, but you can change somebody’s life. If that only happens once a month, it’s still worth getting up every morning and coming to work. And it happens way more often than that.
Another example: Emilio Cueto is a major Cuban historian and a donor to the libraries. He had looked for years for a manuscript that had been written in the 1800s and then disappeared—a volume of botanical drawings of flora and fauna from Cuba. He called me one morning and said, “I think I found it, but I can’t tell from WorldCat what library it’s in.”
I signed on with my credentials, found out it was at Cornell, and reached out to them. It turned out they had that manuscript for 90 years. A descendant of the artist had donated it. Emilio and I went up to Cornell together to see it. It’s fantastic. They’ve digitized it now, but I keep talking to them about publishing it in Spanish and English so the people of Cuba can have access to it.
He had looked for this manuscript for years, and other people had looked for it too. He thinks I walk on water—I don’t walk on water. He found the citation after looking for it off and on over many years! But the fact that I could be a part of that…these are the things that make this profession so wonderful. You’re fulfilling people’s dreams.
After Emilio gave a presentation in Havana about our discovery, the head of the National Library of Cuba said that, of all the things we had discovered and digitized for the Cuba Initiative (Celebrating Cuba!), this was the most important single thing that we had found.
There’s a wonderful National Geographic article about it that one of my faculty here helped get published: “ ‘Lost’ Book of Exquisite Scientific Drawings Rediscovered After 190 Years.”
Why wouldn’t you want to do this job? We can make a huge difference in people’s research and people’s personal lives.
Katherine: Which areas in librarianship would you encourage young professionals to focus on?
Judy: I would say to them to do something like I did—volunteer and find out what you like. We have a special set of internships offered to current student workers to do research in a library collection, or do a research project unrelated to the department they work in, so that it encourages them to see a different aspect of the library. We hired them to do a job in special collections, but what happens if they end up doing a project in another area, and begin to learn that there’s more to the field than just the little but that they were seeing.
Katherine: What are you looking forward to in your next phase?
Judy: I am moving back to the DC area. I still have a lot of friends there, new and old. I have several things I’m involved in where I’ve said, “I don’t expect these to stop just because I’m on sabbatical or retired.” If I can still make a difference and people still value it, I want to participate. Two of my three children and all three grandchildren live there, so there have been a lot of years when I’ve been here and they aren’t. You can’t make that time up, but I’ll have more time with them going forward.
I mentioned Emilio from Cuba—he has a massive collection about Cuba that he’s built up over years. He was one of the “Pedro Pan”—the children who came to the US from Cuba without their parents. He has two huge old apartments in DC full of things he has collected about Cuba, and at some point, he will be shipping them to Cuba to form a research collection there. We’ve talked about going through that collection and finding unique items that UF should digitize before they’re shipped to Cuba, because who knows when we’d be able to get them digitized after that? We’re starting with the map collection, but I’ll be working with him to see what else is in his collection. He’s agreed to lend things to us for digitization.
Katherine: Thank you for sharing. This has been a wonderful conversation.
