What I learned in class: Library Administration and Management

This was a very interesting class, and may have been more complicated for public librarians than school or academic librarians, as we report to a principal and a central office media services department and have a lot of our managing done for us. Additionally we do not usually have a staff, especially in tough economic times when media assistant jobs are cut. Still, there are some very interesting aspects of management in general and managing a school library specifically.

The course began with some basic business administration concepts. I minored in business as an undergraduate but have done nothing with that knowledge since then, in fact, I had forgotten a lot of it. The most memorable aspect to me, an aspect that I do not believe was taught in my early-1990s business classes at Appalachian State, was how doing business has changed from the 20th century industrial age to the 21st century information age. The business hierarchy that most of us are familiar with, in which a person is hired to do a specific job, and each person reports to a supervisor, who reports to another supervisor, is outdated, although that is the business model that most libraries still use. The information age model involves more teams and group projects in which each person contributes a set of skills and new ideas to a company's mission, even if those skills or new ideas do not fit within a boxed-in job description. Moving up and down a corporate ladder is easier under a 21st century model as well, and innovation is encouraged.

We learned how to determine who our stakeholders are. The school library exists to serve the students and the school faculty, but other stakeholders are the parents, the Board of Education, and the taxpayers of the community. Every decision made in the library must be done with these stakeholders in mind.

We also learned how to advocate for funding for the library, a crucial skill in a recession, using data indicating that a well-equipped library has a positive impact on student achievement. For the record, studies conducted in 19 states and one Canadian province have all shown the same result: schools with a well-equipped school library and a licensed school librarian show an increase in student achievement scores. Here is a short summary from the Laura Bush Foundation.

We did a study of leadership skills and wrote our own philosophy of leadership, describing what a leader should look like in the library setting. I had a moment of panic in realizing that librarianship is not a job for a shy person. But neither is classroom teaching and I did that for 12 years.