Last Updated on May 2, 2025, 12:37 pm ET
University Librarian Steve Mandeville-Gamble will retire at the end of the academic year, after leading the University of California (UC) Riverside Library for more than 12 years. Read our oral history interview with him about his career and the profession below.
Kevin: Why and how did you get started in librarianship?
Steve: My academic background is cultural anthropology as an undergrad and sociolinguistic anthropology as a grad student. I was in a master’s/PhD program at the University of Michigan and I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish the PhD there. Once I finished the requirements for the master’s I decided to apply to get the master’s conferred, take a year off and go back to the San Francisco Bay Area to Stanford, where I had been an undergrad. While there I met up with my former boss who was the former head of the Cubberley Education Library. While catching up over lunch she let me know about a one-year position that had just opened up in special collections on the reference desk and suggested I apply. I did and I got it and I fell in love with the work. What I was really interested in academically was the way in which day-to-day language is used to shape our perception of the world and how culture change is driven through language over time. Of course, to do that type of research archives are incredibly important. And so I was in hog heaven being able to help as a reference specialist that year, helping people navigate their way through our archival and manuscript collections to find the information they needed.
Then about three or four months in, a young woman came in and she wanted to do a research project on the African American experience in the mid-peninsula region. And we had nothing—nothing—in the archives. I had this aha moment: Yes, it’s true that archives and manuscript repositories really do provide you the opportunity to study culture change over time. However, if all you have is the papers of rich dead white guys, you can ask a lot of questions about rich dead white guys, but you can’t get as nuanced a set of answers for everyone else. So I decided once that year was up that this is what I wanted to do professionally. I applied to library school at Berkeley and I wrote a very impassioned application essay about the importance of diversifying the holdings of research libraries to ensure that underrepresented voices were present in the historical record. I got in, and in fact I got a Regents’ Fellowship that I didn’t even apply for, but the regents paid my way to go to library school. I finished my library degree and within a year or two found myself back at Stanford working as the project lead to process the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund records, which was about 2,000 linear feet of records at the time.
So that’s how I went from being a sociolinguist convinced I was going to study language dynamics between Catalan and Castilian speakers in Spain to working on civil rights collections for 20 years. That led to the first half of my career, getting to do exactly what I wanted to do, which was to help ensure that diverse voices were represented in the archival record. I loved doing that.
Kevin: What are the highlights of your career?
Steve: Definitely working on the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). That project was NEH grant-funded and after finishing it I was hired on more permanent funding at Stanford. After finishing the first accession of MALDEF papers, they offered to donate the next 20 years of records, which filled one and a half semi trucks worth of material. We flew to LA to get it all packed up onto the trucks to be taken up to Stanford, and the president of MALDEF invited us to her office for a chat. During our visit, she had to take a call, but told us to not go anywhere. She got on the phone and said, “Well, tell Bill I won’t accept anything less than a Supreme Court nomination so I’m going to pass on the chance to be an appellate court judge,” and hung up. It was the White House asking her if she would serve on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals or wherever. And she had turned them down while we sat there in her office. That was a rather exciting highlight. So, you know, being a librarian is cool, kids!
I also had an opportunity to work with the Allen Ginsberg papers and got the opportunity to meet Allen through this work. I had a chance to visit his New York office and apartment. While showing me around the apartment his administrative assistant said, “Oh, Steve, by the way, some of the really good stuff I need your help to get to. Help me move the mattress off of his bed.” I said, “Why would we be…” “Just trust me, Steve,” the assistant said. Allen’s mattress was on a raised wooden dais with a secret hatch underneath that led into a space within the wooden structure. It turned out that a number of his dear friends struggled with substance abuse and often stole his works, taking them to rare book vendors to sell. The vendors then called Allen to get the materials back to him. So items like the original mimeograph of Howl and Other Poems along with other valuable things were hidden in this secret compartment under his bed.
In another building in an office he maintained I found in his files some of the most amazing titles like “Fuzz Pushing Dope,” which was his framing for Iran-Contra—a CIA dope conspiracy. “Fuzz Pushing Dope” was about New York police stealing huge amounts of drugs and turning around to sell them on the streets.
Other big highlights include working on the National Council of La Raza Records and the Huey P. Newton papers. The records of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation are the central files of the Black Panther Party. I could go on and on about various collections like these.
I helped secure about $7.25 million of funding from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters for George Washington University that included a $2.5 million endowment for a labor historian in the history department, $2.5 million for a labor archivist in the library, and roughly $2 million to build a labor history center at the top floor of George Washington University Libraries. I got to the point where Jim Hoffa Jr. would invite me to the National Press Club to have lunch when he was giving policy speeches. That was rather exciting. Like, oh my gosh, who knew I would ever sit in this place?
I got to work with some of the most intelligent, dynamic, engaged, and energized people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with and who always kept me on my toes. I learned so much about what we could be doing and thinking as librarians to help the academy prepare for emerging demands in terms of digital content and digital scholarship. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for the world.
Kevin: Were there goals that you set as a director that you have not yet reached?
Steve: I’ll answer with some positive insights, but also talking about what has not happened. When I accepted this position at UCR, the library was kind of considered the ugly duckling in the UC system compared to the other UC libraries. The librarians would even say, “Oh, we don’t have to work as hard or as smart as our colleagues at the other UCs because we’re not really a UC.” And I said, “No, no, no, no. We are all paid on the same UC salary scale for librarians. This is a major research institution and we are going to step our game up.”
On campus, when I first got here, there were two deans who were advocating defunding the library. One said that the library is irrelevant. He said, “Steve, you’re really smart and I really value what you bring to the table. But honestly, I could do a better job with less money and not have to support the size of staff that you have.” Fast forward six years and it was a completely different story. The deans were making it really clear that we had gone from being an anachronism to one of the key thought partners on campus. I mean, I’ve literally had multiple deans here say that they look forward to being able to partner with us, that they see us as a valued thought partner. So we’re in a very, very different place. We’ve really stepped up our game and our librarians and staff are now seen as leaders in the profession and in the UC libraries, as opposed to hangers on. One of the goals that I had was that we would have leadership roles at all levels of the UC library’s collaborative engagements and we do, so that’s the positive.
The negative is I’ve had a number of setbacks, including repeated budget cuts. When I started at UCR in March 2013 we had 103 positions on the books in the library, which is very small. We had 155 positions a year or two before, but because of the downturn in the economy of 2008, 52 positions had been slashed by 2012. So I inherited an operation with only two-thirds of the positions it had just 18 months prior. Staff were demoralized and at the same time the university was focused on an aggressive increase in the size of the student population. There were around 21,000 students when I got here. We’re up to 27,000 now, with a goal of increasing up to 35,000 students within the next eight years. We have also increased our faculty by 50 percent. So the library has fewer staff supporting a much bigger academic program and a collection budget that has been slashed by a full third to $4.125 million when I arrived, down from $6.6 million just 18 months earlier.
When the pandemic hit we lost more people. Many staff, 30 to 40 percent, were in the later stages of their careers and decided to retire rather than try to work remotely. When we opened back up we had 50 percent of our public service front-facing staff quit just weeks before we reopened. Many of those who were left were getting snapped up by other institutions. I can’t really be too upset about that, though. I nominated one of those mid-level managers to be an AUL at a school where she ended up with a staff that was 8 to 10 times larger than her staff was here. Not wanting to get in her way, I very much lobbied for her to be a candidate for that position. We were not even back on campus and had to keep library operations going with a skeletal management team and many key positions vacant. It was rough, and it limited the progress we could have otherwise made.
This includes areas like our support for digital scholarship, which is picking up speed again after we lost several key staff in our nascent digital scholarship unit towards the tail end of the pandemic. We’ve made some great strategic hires in the last six months to a year, but it took a while because there were just not enough people with the skill sets out there at the end of the pandemic and other libraries were competing for the same skills at the same time.
Another big thing that I find really unfortunate is that we have not attained the development goals that I set for myself and the UCR Library when I started in 2013. I’ve had tremendous success doing development work at every other institution I’ve worked at. I helped bring in $25 million worth of gifts to George Washington University. I also had significant success at Stanford working with colleagues to help bring in major gifts of collections. So I was looking forward to being able to do some really amazing things with our development team on this campus.
Unfortunately, UCR as a whole faces two big challenges that make raising money more difficult here than at other institutions where I have worked: first, UCR is a relatively young university, only having been founded in 1954. For most of that time it was a much smaller institution. When I arrived at UCR, there were quite a few library staff who began working at UCR when it had fewer than 5,000 students. It has only been in the last 20 years that UCR’s student population has grown to over 20,000. As a result, more than 50% of our alumni are under the age of 30. They have not yet entered their prime years in terms of income attainment and are two decades away from when most alumni have reached a point where they are able to consider significant gifts.
Secondly, the Inland Southern California area is a major logistics hub for the United States but does not have a critical mass of industries that generate high-paying jobs. That situation is improving, but the relative scarcity of enterprises generating significant wealth has made fundraising in this region more difficult than other areas of the country. For instance, UC San Diego is surrounded by major biotech companies, aerospace engineering firms, and the defense industry, to name a few. UC Irvine is surrounded by Silicon Beach; Stanford by Silicon Valley. For UCR, it is Amazon warehouses. As a result, friends and colleagues doing development work have often shared that this is the most challenging institution to fundraise for in their careers.
Finally, in the UCR Library specifically, we have seen a rapid turnover of development directors, often as a result of high-performing development directors in the library being pulled into supporting other units across campus or into Central Development to help offset some of the challenges that I just mentioned. All of these factors taken together have resulted in our not hitting the development goals that I had set out for myself and the UCR Library at the beginning of my tenure here. So that’s a disappointment—I don’t feel like we have gotten where I had hoped we would get.
All of that being said, we have had our successes: when the campus launched its first-ever Comprehensive Campaign, a very modest target was set for the library. The development director at the time and I increased that goal from $3 million to $5 million and then surpassed it by an additional $2.5 million. We have been able to establish an endowment to support our world-class Eaton Science Fiction Collection to ensure its long-term support as well as a number of collections endowments and endowments to support the Creat’R Lab, UCR Library’s makerspace. But I would have liked to do more.
The other area where I would have liked to see more progress is in terms of our facilities. Our facilities are in terrible shape. They are. And it’s known. My two libraries are number five and seven on the campus’s list of buildings that desperately need and are in the highest priority for renovation and refurbishment. But there’s no state funding for it. My campus has had some big wins in terms of securing state funding for much-needed new buildings, but there is not an appetite in the state legislature to fund deferred maintenance costs, which on my campus have risen to the hundreds of millions of dollars. And since we’ve had such rapid turnover in our development directors, raising extramural funding has been difficult.
I wanted to be able to do a lot more in terms of creating a sense of energy and dynamism that our students deserve by making the spaces of both buildings really dynamic. Through very careful planning and hoarding money I’ve been able to put millions aside for these efforts to at least spruce up the spaces over the past 12 years. But in some cases, the money has been tied up in bureaucratic snarls—sometimes for years—after the library secured the funding needed. So that’s one of my biggest unmet goals. We have been able to make some significant improvements, don’t get me wrong. But so much more could have been done with the resources I was able to pull together.
Kevin: What advice do you have for individuals who aspire to leadership positions/roles in libraries?
Steve: Active listening is a really wonderful skill set. Develop it. I love to gab, so people might find this amusing, but I think the most powerful thing I can do in a conversation is to ask questions, ask clarifying questions and to shut the heck up as much as possible! Learning to listen more than you speak is a critical skill for people in these types of positions.
One piece of advice I would give—and this is the thing that I think helped me be as effective as possible—is to get engaged very deeply at the highest possible levels within the university. I attended the Dean’s Council and got myself onto the central finance committee. I constantly tried to put myself in the shoes of the people above me in the organization like provosts, chancellors, or presidents to try to understand what motivated them and what their drivers were so I could see how the library could engage and contribute. This created win-win opportunities. Instead of coming at it saying, “Hey, this is what I need for the library,” or “This is what I want from the library,” I tried to always figure out the aspirations of the provost, chancellor, or other leaders. Then I could say, “Hey, I see this is a priority for you and this is an area we are also interested in. Here’s a pathway I see where we could collaborate and create a bigger win-win.”
A really important lesson for budding leaders to learn is to learn how to center the mission of the whole institution. By doing that, the library becomes a more valued partner. A lot of people at libraries will kick and scream and say, “We are the heart of the campus! We are the most important thing on campus!” In my experience, this approach just doesn’t go over well. The problem is that it comes across as trying to demand respect. Instead, a better path is to command respect by demonstrating our value. This is a key difference I really encourage up-and-coming library leaders to consider, which is how do we command respect and demonstrate our value and do it in a way that doesn’t come across as beating our chest, but makes us that much more valuable as we are perceived as indispensable.
Another piece of advice would be to look into the book Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Bolman and Deal. For up-and-coming leaders I recommend they read and really wrap their minds around this concept of the four frames of management. From my own experience, I agree that it’s absolutely true that you can be a really good leader in one of those four areas, but it’s what you’re not as good at in those other three areas that will trip you up.
The other thing that is critically important is to understand the context in which your institution is embedded. For example the UC system describes itself as one library on ten campuses or one university on ten campuses. That’s not just a statement, comment, or aspiration. That really is what we are. It’s so integrated and so intimately tied together that what might work at a flagship school in another state doesn’t quite work here. We have local nuance and local campuses, but it would be really important for someone coming into the UC system to understand just how much work is done consortially, or in collaboration, and might look different than other places. Understanding how people see themselves and each other in these contexts and being sensitive to the political dynamics in these environments is critical.
Kevin: What key issues do you think research libraries will face in the next five years?
Steve: One big issue—and we’re seeing it play out right now with the current administration in Washington—is that the American people have lost faith in higher education. We are at a moment when we are seeing some of the lowest approval ratings ever in terms of people valuing higher education. Higher education is what made this country such a powerhouse economically and geopolitically. The fact that the compact between the government and universities seems to be tenuous at best right now is a result of a long-term erosion of trust in higher education and the breakdown of a more monolithic understanding of truth. So now there are many small-t truths that are replacing the big-T Truth.
And if you think about it, libraries have been engines of truth. I mean, accumulating information, helping people develop the skills to identify high-quality versus low-quality information, propaganda versus data, the work on informational literacy and teaching people critical thinking skills—all will be a critically important role for libraries for years to come. And yet we’ve got to do it in an environment where the very work of what libraries are doing is under attack. So I think it’s going to be tough.
One of the things about retiring at this moment is that personally, I am finding it increasingly difficult to stay politically neutral or to say things that will not be seen as politically charged. When truth—and speaking truth—becomes considered political action as opposed to just speaking truth it really does endanger the profession and I think the library profession is going to be facing some very tough times. I don’t mean to be so negative, but I think librarians moving forward are going to have to figure out how to speak truth to power, hold their ground academically, and affirm and continue to reaffirm their commitment to truth. I don’t mean that in a simplistic monolithic truth, but the social creation of an interpretation of truth through ongoing engagement of different thought communities.
I think another big issue that is going to be facing libraries relates to funding. We’re seeing a mass defunding of the library starting to happen in the UC system. Partly because we’ve been so successful as a consortium or through our collaborations, that is creating the impression that the University of California system can continue to maintain this absolutely world-class academic and research powerhouse operation without having to invest nearly as much percentage-wise in the libraries. And it is going to bite us in the backside. Most of the UC libraries are at the point where we can barely maintain our system-wide licenses for journals and databases, and we’re spending a decreasing percentage of our resources on monographs and other items that we purchase for ongoing access. I’m really concerned that if we don’t figure out how to change that trajectory—even though the UC system has the second largest monograph collection in the world, second only to the Library of Congress—we’re not continuing to build it and that wonderfully comprehensive collection is going to start aging. And as that happens I think it’s going to create a problem. I know other campuses around the country are dealing with with budget cuts, so I don’t want to make it sound like it’s only the UCs, but from my perspective within the UC, I see this as a really dangerous trend and I think academic libraries are going to have to figure out how to demonstrate the return on investment of funding research libraries comprehensively.
It’s the whole reason I’m an assessment person. And it’s not my skill set but I got really involved with ARL’s Research and Analytics efforts because it became clear to me that we have got to figure out both narratively, qualitatively, and quantitatively how to tell the collective story of the impact of libraries and their ongoing value. I think the ubiquity of information on the internet has created this false sense that everything’s free, everything’s out there already, and it’s just not true. If it weren’t for what we spend as academic research libraries a lot of critically important content would not be made available, would not be discoverable.
Another thing is the changing nature of scholarship. Scholarship is increasingly using digitally informed research methodologies, many of which our faculty are not fully conversant on. I think there is a critical role for years to come in terms of the library finding the right niche within digital scholarship on their various campuses.
And of course, starting immediately, libraries have to dive into the artificial intelligence arena. If we don’t get involved now, we will find ourselves increasingly relegated to the margins of the academy. I see at least three major areas of engagement that libraries need to focus on: (1) the ethics of using artificial intelligence, not least of which are the large language models like ChatGPT, in the authoring and creation of academic content; (2) the responsible use of artificial intelligence tools to create or enhance metadata to improve accessibility to content; and (3) research and analysis using artificial intelligence tools to make new discoveries in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences.
And finally, because I am a special collections librarian, I think archives and manuscripts, both physical and digital, are incredibly important and will be for years.
Kevin: What still inspires you about librarianship?
Steve: One of the things about my campus is that we always rate extremely highly in terms of our ability to help students who enter UCR from the bottom socioeconomic quintile leave UCR in the top quintile. So, we are incredibly effective as a university in helping underprivileged, underrepresented, young adults achieve amazing success. The library is a key contributor to that success. That is something we’re really proud of.
Our students are graduating across the board at the same graduation rates, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic class. Researchers on my campus have been doing a deep dive to examine what we’re doing that works to get our students through. The number one thing they said over and over: “It’s the library. The library gave us a place. The library is our home. The library is the place that inspires us.” The library has been called out again and again by our students saying we’ve been critical for their success, both personally and academically. I find that really inspiring.
We also have a geospatial science librarian who started here and there was not a community doing geospatial research, but there were individuals. She immediately created a brown-bag discussion series that has now been meeting monthly for eight or nine years. It’s created this powerhouse of faculty from disciplines across the campus who have come together along with their students and are using geospatial information in really sophisticated ways that’s driving amazing research or enabling or supporting amazing research in disciplines as disparate as medicine and sociology and crop sciences. And that community came together because a library staff member—our geospatial sciences librarian—did her thing and brought together a community of people that wouldn’t otherwise have spoken to one another.
Similarly, we have the Creat’R Lab—our makerspace—that is doing exactly what we wanted. We wanted it to be a place where people from different disciplines on campus could come together to discuss new methodologies and techniques, and create new ideas, products, etc. A research faculty member in earth sciences came to us and said, “Hey, I’ve got this really complex data set of all of the earthquake faults in Southern California that shows the depths of the faults and what direction they sink into the ground and where they intersect. It’s hard to visualize on the screen, but the data is there. Is there some way we could print this out?” So we figured it out and printed a 3D map for him of all these earthquake faults. It was such a revolutionary moment in geospatial science or geosciences in the US that he was asked to come testify multiple times in Congress. And nowadays, if you’re an earthquake science researcher and you don’t have a 3D printer sitting in your office you’re not using the most cutting edge way to visualize that earthquake fault. Because of this project, he could see how earthquake faults in Southern California—which were not understood to connect or be related to each other—if they went deep enough and at the correct angles, might actually, in fact, do connect. So the library’s support and collaboration led to a much better understanding of the way in which earthquake faults interconnect in Southern California.
It wasn’t that it was our idea. It was that we were able to do our legitimate role to create the boundary conditions that have allowed disparate researchers to come together, be creative, think outside the box, and make new discoveries. I always describe what libraries do by saying libraries haven’t changed their mission in thousands of years. It’s always been about bringing people and information together to change the world. And we’re still doing it. The information might come in different packages. The ways in which we use that information and help people come together with that information and with each other might use different technologies, but the underlying mission is the same. And we as librarians get to be part of it. We get to be part of that environment that is bringing people together and creating communities of scholars. That still inspires me. There’s a really palpable and powerful role for libraries to play as the group or entity that helps foster communities of practice, communities of engagement, and we have no idea as to how this is going to unfold or what direction it will take, but I have one more example from our Creat’R Lab.
When we were first demoing the 3D printers, before we even called it the Creat’R Lab, we had a research scientist from our psychology department who used three-dimensional objects with different textures to help patients recovering from traumatic brain injuries. Feeling the different objects with different shapes and textures can help their brains rewire themselves. The 3D printer is exactly what he needed to produce more combinations of objects with different shapes and textures. He just didn’t have the mathematical skill set to do it. He asked if we could connect him with someone in engineering or mathematics who could. We fostered a connection with a PhD candidate to help. Fast forward to today and our dean of Engineering mentioned he had built two makerspaces in the college, but students could only use them if they were enrolled in classes whose coursework required 3D printing. He remarked that the library’s makerspace is available 20 hours a day by any student, not just his students in engineering. He assured me that engineering students who get the chance to play with designing and printing objects—and not just for their coursework—will make a minimum of $75,000 after graduation (which is more like $100,000 today).
And that is a huge part of our success in terms of getting students launched and moving them from family incomes of $50,000 to personal incomes of over $100,000 in about a four-year time frame. That’s really exciting. That’s impact. It’s about community and creating the conditions that allow people to come together and create new knowledge, new methodologies, and think outside the box. Libraries don’t have to drive that, we just have to create the conditions for it to happen.
Kevin: What areas in librarianship would you encourage young professionals to focus on?
Steve: When I was going through library school there was this big push to have everyone go into special collections. I still really value special collections, and I think there’s still a real need for special collections librarians, so that’s an area that I would urge people to consider.
What we’re now running into is a shortage of metadata librarians. Cataloging became kind of déclassé and not as many students or those who were preparing to go into librarianship focused on cataloging. Well, the need for good catalogers has really evolved into a much more dynamic and much more sophisticated set of metadata-capture methodology and there’s a desperate need for people with strong metadata skills. I am not a programmer, but if someone has programming and/or strong scripting skills and they’re doing metadata capture, metadata analysis, or similar, that is really, really critical. It’s definitely a growth area.
I think digital scholarship will continue to be a growth area. And artificial intelligence is a growth area within librarianship, with opportunities as I mentioned earlier to be engaged in shaping an understanding of the ethical use of artificial intelligence in the creation of new knowledge, using AI tools to do the original research that underpins this new knowledge, and incorporating AI tools into the day-to-day operations of libraries.
One thing I would caution is that a lot of people go into library school thinking they’re going to become a reference librarian. The reality is that it is not a growth area. Most research libraries are starting to really struggle to continue the liaison model of librarianship where you had subject experts who focused explicitly on one subject or a fairly narrowly related set of subjects. For even the largest schools in the UC system that’s starting to be very difficult to do and we’re starting to see signals that we’re going to have to switch to a functional model. So I would encourage people to think more in terms of functional skill sets as opposed to specific subject skill sets.
I think supporting research and research methodologies is a growth area. And teaching and learning. We dissolved our two reference and instruction departments in each of our two libraries and rearranged who’s working on what. Now we have a teaching and learning department that really focuses deeply on teaching pedagogies and information literacy. And not just information literacy, but data literacy, visual literacy, etc. We sometimes refer to the literacies, so that’s also a growth area.
Kevin: What do you look forward to in the next phase of your life?
Steve: You know, I’m only just turning 60 three weeks after I retire so I don’t feel like I’m done yet. I was contemplating doing volunteer work in the cultural heritage arena, which is my first love (special collections, archives, manuscripts, etc.). There may even be some opportunities for getting to work on, build, and manage archives and manuscript collections, but outside of a research library.
At times, I struggled to balance the administrative requirements of a UL position with my personal life: these positions are all-consuming. My first year as a UL, I was speaking with a senior colleague who lived and worked on the West Coast while her husband lived on the East Coast as we sat next to each other on a flight back to the West Coast. She shared that her husband always had to fly to see her rather than the other way around. In her words, “Steve, these jobs demand your attention at all hours of the day and night, seven days a week.” That doesn’t leave much time for friends, family, or downtime to recuperate and re-energize.
My parents are in their 80s and are still in amazingly good shape. Even though I’ve got the time on the books to take vacation, it is really tough sometimes to actually carve enough time in my schedule to see them. Inevitably there’s always one critically important meeting or one must-attend event that makes scheduling time to see them problematic. I want to be able to spend quality time with them while I can. I’m very much looking forward to being able to spend time with my parents, my siblings and their kids and my new baby grandniece, and my friends for a change!
So that’s what I’m envisioning. I still want to give back to the community and engage in furthering the vision of the effectiveness of cultural heritage organizations while having a bit more time to spend with the people important in my life.
Kevin: Is there anything else you would like to say?
Steve: I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the professional engagements that I got to engage in through ARL. Getting involved was very meaningful to me and I would definitely urge others who find themselves in a UL position or library director position at an ARL institution to get involved and engaged. It’s definitely worth it.
It’s important to reconnect with your passion from time to time. Why are you in librarianship? Is this the right position? Are you able to make the impact that you want or have things pulled you away from what you really want or can have the opportunity to make the biggest impact? Maybe there’s a chance to step back and look at how you’ve shaped your position. Are there ways to refocus things on what you want to do? Ultimately, if it’s not a good fit, walk away and do something else.
I did not come into the profession with a game plan on how I would become a university librarian. That was never my goal. I had colleagues who were entering the profession around the same time I did and they would say, “In X years, I’m going to be a department head. In Y years, I’m going to be an AUL. And in Z years I’m going to be a UL.” In a weird way, I’ve surpassed all of their career expectations. I did it by following my passion—what I was really interested in. And because I wasn’t trying to force it, by just trying to do my best to follow my own dreams and engage in what I found most meaningful, it became effortless to actually invest the time and energy to become an expert at the things I became expert in. Developing these skills served me well and actually helped move my career forward in an organic way.
And I always did it with a huge sense of play. I think it’s really important to have a sense of playfulness in this work and try to keep yourself mentally flexible and as mentally young as possible. I don’t mean immature, but try to maintain a sense of wonder for the amazing things we get to do everyday in these careers. That makes it all way more rewarding. Because it’s been a sheer pleasure getting to do what I’ve gotten to do. I think I might leave it at that. Yes, inculcate a healthy sense of play and you will end up with a good quality of life.
