Last Updated on June 23, 2025, 1:44 pm ET
Gale Etschmaier is retiring this month as dean of University Libraries at Florida State University (FSU), after almost seven years at FSU and more than thirty years in academic library leadership. We chatted about her career and the profession—the interview follows.
Judy: Why and how did you get started in librarianship?
Gale: It’s not a very straightforward path, actually.
I was always an avid reader. I loved reading. But when I went to college, my major was music. And as I was getting close to graduation, I realized that music was not going to give me a career. And so I started thinking about possibilities. My sister was a librarian and I met a music librarian. And I took a class as an undergraduate in library research and I really found it fascinating.
But also, I’m a first-generation college person and having experienced what a library can do for you, especially a large public institution, I realized that a library can create a sense of community and belonging that is very impactful. And that to me was a great way to get started in librarianship. I started out in music cataloging and very quickly moved into other areas.
Judy: Can you share some of the highlights of your career?
Gale: I have had so many different kinds of experiences, like doing music cataloging in my first academic library job. I had actually worked in a public library before that for part of a year before I got my first academic library job. And I learned so much from my first supervisor who has been an incredible influence in my perspective on leadership and work throughout my career.
I moved from there to University of Massachusetts Lowell, where I supervised technical services. And then I went to George Washington University (GW) as head of cataloging and systems. I was only there for a year when I got married and went to Austria. When I came back, I had this incredible opportunity to be the first librarian at the Virginia campus of GW.
I had experience doing Dialog searches for my husband’s business—I was really doing corporate librarianship at GW. I had an understanding of the importance of the research question and getting in-depth knowledge of what these students were working on. They were executive students. It was really a wonderful experience.
At that point in my career, librarians thought that we were the only ones who could do searches of electronic resources, but I had the opportunity to work with some of the early databases where people could do the searches themselves. I was a firm believer in that—that students had the discipline knowledge that I did not. And so working with them to teach them the search strategy was the most effective way of working with them.
I didn’t stay at the Virginia campus. I took some time off because my children were very young, and I went back to GW in 1995 and managed document delivery and a fee-based service. That gave me an incredible sense of urgency because we were responding to requests from lobbyists, from lawyers. And so we had to provide rush services and also really excellent services.
But it also taught me about the changing nature of libraries. This was in 1995. In one of the first meetings of a fee-based service managers group I attended they were talking about the new World Wide Web and how people were moving to the web for their document delivery and research services, but they would come back because it wasn’t good enough and they would come back to traditional services. I think that is such an incredible story and to me it’s a prelude to how we need to think about artificial intelligence. We can ignore it, bury our heads and not learn about it and be obsolete, or we can embrace it, learn about it, take a seat at the table, and become the experts.
From there, I became the associate university librarian for Public Services and learned about the value of complaints. Complaints are a gift that you can learn from and make changes in policies and your service model.
Then at a later age, I went back to college for my doctorate in higher education management. That was really transformative because it gave me a broader perspective of the changes in higher education, the needs in higher education, and the ability to think about how as libraries we can contribute the most to teaching, learning, and research.
From there, I went into being a dean at San Diego State University and then later Florida State. I think at both San Diego State and Florida State learning about how renovations of learning spaces can impact our communities was a really important highlight.
At San Diego State there was a student who had been a foster child. And we had just done a renovation of our 24-hour reading room. We had furniture that we had very thoughtfully selected so that there were varieties of furniture, there was natural light, lots of outlets. This student was studying for her LSATs and she came in to thank us. She said, “The room that you have just renovated, where you put this new furniture, is such a great place to study. It makes me feel important. It makes me feel as if I am capable of doing well on this LSAT and going on to be a lawyer.” And she passed her LSATs and went on to law school but it was really just heartwarming to hear how this kind of change can impact the learning experience of a student.
Judy: That is a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing it. Were there goals that you set for yourself as a director that you have not yet reached?
Gale: One of my goals that I haven’t reached is I really came to Florida State hoping to build a new library. And there was a lot of encouragement but with everything that’s happened, it just wasn’t meant to be. So I’ve shifted in terms of goals. When I came here, one of the first things I had to do was to really make a decision about canceling the “big deal” with Elsevier. That was huge. I had lots of support on the campus. And it was absolutely the right decision because it allowed us to reallocate funding to support the research materials that were most needed across the campus and the disciplines.
Judy: What advice do you have for people who aspire to leadership positions or roles in libraries?
Gale: I would say that it’s important for them to look at the broader institutional goals. This is something I carry with me from my dissertation work, from really learning more about higher education needs and how it’s changing, looking at those broader institutional goals and thinking creatively about how the library can most impactfully contribute to teaching, learning, and research.
Judy: Thank you. What key issues do you think research libraries will face in the next five years?
Gale: I think there are a number of them. I think AI is much bigger than many people realize. I think it’s something we can’t ignore. AI really started in 1956 in a meeting in Dartmouth, it has been developing since then. There have been a lot of predictions that we are closer to the singularity at this point than we’ve ever been. I think librarians have a really important role to play because we are guardians of privacy and ethical use of information.
By learning about tools in artificial intelligence, really being able to help students and faculty with these tools and selecting them, I think we can be curators of AI tools. But we should be at the table when it comes to the policies about really looking at the accuracy of AI, about the ethical use, about privacy issues.
I also think the changes in perceptions of higher education institutions and the focus by legislators are important. We need to be prepared to make the case that libraries provide a broad spectrum of information and thought. And we need to focus on the data and make sure that we’re telling the story of how we’re providing that kind of information that people can use on their own and think critically about and come to their own conclusions. But if we limit the perspectives that we’re providing, we’re not meeting our mission as an educational entity.
And funding, of course, is going to be a problem in the next few years as the economy is so uncertain. But we’ve been through that through my whole career. We have been through peaks and valleys of funding so many times. As important as it is, I don’t think it’s the top issue.
Judy: What still inspires you about librarianship?
Gale: So many things. I think libraries have always been central to independent learning. The first educational institutions were libraries, a place for the known knowledge to be collected so that people could really discover, reflect, and create their own scholarship. That mission is true today. I think that librarians have always been leaders in emerging technologies and observing how students from across all disciplines learn and use information and how faculty are doing research and how that new scholarship is created. And I think we’ve been central in the research life cycle, and that is exciting. I think data research impact is something very exciting, really understanding more about how data fits in the research life cycle and what our role is. I think that has opened up all kinds of avenues for contributing to teaching, learning, and research.
Judy: What areas in librarianship would you encourage young professionals to focus on?
Gale: I would say they definitely need to be thinking about data, about the nature of information and what kinds of information fall in the realm of the work we do.
I think that looking at digital scholarship, at data analysis and visualization, and certainly cultural heritage work is always important. It really is looking at the opportunities broadly and figuring out what most appeals to their passion, and then focusing on that.
Judy: You’re making a very good case for the importance of libraries
Gale: And I really believe libraries are so central to the educational mission and drivers of social and economic mobility, which has been my own personal experience.
Judy: That is wonderful. What do you look forward to in the next phase of your life and career?
Gale: So at this point, I’m really looking forward to spending more time with friends and family. My husband has written a book that I’m going to help edit. And I look forward to just having time to read and to listen to music. I hope to play piano again, which is something I haven’t been able to do for years.
Judy: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Gale: I just think that librarianship is a great field and people may not realize how many opportunities there are to really delve into different areas and to work with the most amazing people. I think our people are really our greatest asset and it has been such a privilege to work with this incredible group.
