As you know, it’s been such a joy to experience the welcome back to Wake Forest and ZSR. What I haven’t had the chance to say as directly is how I have also been looking forward to reconnecting with the North Carolina academic library community. When I started my career here, I thought the collegiality and mutual support among libraries was simply the nature of our profession. In hindsight, North Carolina has an especially special way of showing up: driving across the state to visit peers, gathering in informal spaces, and investing time in building genuine, intentional connection. It’s enriching personally, but also helps us all grow professionally and be better positioned to support our local community as a result.

With this context, I was so excited to be invited to speak to the UNC System University Library Advisory Council last week. This was a meeting of colleagues from all 17 UNC libraries and the system office, including longtime friends like Wanda K. Brown (representing WSSU) and many newer deans who have joined the UNC system community.

I was asked to speak on emerging trends, which is a challenge given how quickly everything around us seems to be evolving! I drew from association strategic plans (The Oberlin Group, ACRL, and ARL), the biennial ACRL Top Trends in Academic Libraries, and the ACRL budget document (annual meeting doc 5), all of which surface common themes: AI, openness, data, demonstrating value, etc. But rather than rehash content this group was likely familiar with, I chose to focus on three meta-trends that I see shaping our work:

New Levels of Disruption: New Levels of Ambiguity

Some of you know that in the early 2000s, I was really energized about how the information environment was changing our student and faculty’s expectations of access to library provided information. Back then we were thinking about Wikipedia, blogging, and Amazon. Now we’re navigating algorithms, misinformation, and artificial intelligence. Beyond the information environment there are changes to our landscape due to politics, policy shifts, budget pressures, and a high rate of administrative turnover. Our users’ expectations are evolving as fast as the world around them and we, in libraries, are stewarding services, collections, and resources through these changes.

All of these disruptions and changes mean that we’re working during a time of incredible ambiguity. Part of our work is having a strategy that enables us to plan and build vision even in light of unforeseen changes. Part of the work of leadership is helping our teams navigate and see how they can meaningfully contribute to a positive future. I think a lot about how to balance a pragmatic realism with hope and optimism, which I’m sure you’ll witness in the years ahead.

More Alike Than Different: But At Times We Are Different

Across associations and institutions, we kept returning to similar themes for good reason. All types of academic libraries are facing the same need to demonstrate their value and respond to a changing landscape informed by data, artificial intelligence, and openness. The way we support our users in these areas may vary by type of institution or the focus of our campus, but we all need to think about how we respond to the intersection of these external factors with our traditional work. Because of that, we can learn a lot from each other and how each institution adapts to support their community in light of new information needs. In many cases we can find ways to support our communities through cross-campus collaboration and collective learning.

And yet, context matters. A solution that works for one of us may not work for all of us, and it is worth reflecting on when it makes sense to consider an alternative path or a different answer than other institutions are focusing on. I often think about Clayton Christensen & Henry Eyring’s The Innovative University: an underlying argument in the book is that institutions should really focus on what makes them distinct, preserve that core, and use that core to define their strategies.

Redefining Collaboration: Fostering Systems Thinking

And the final theme I focused on was a question of how do we collaborate when the old rules are shifting? What does knowledge-sharing look like when national associations are in flux, there is an increased focus on regional events, and smaller, more focused conferences are increasing in importance? How do we go about creating standards, guidelines, and toolkits if many in the profession are thinking differently about investing their time in association work?

I often turn to Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, and the concept of Learning Organizations, when thinking about how to help groups move through times of change and complexity. Part of Learning Organizations is personal mastery: personal understanding and excellence in your own work. But a lot of a Learning Organization is shared: mental models, vision, and team learning. With all of this comes systems thinking: understanding how our organization works as a system, but also within the system of the University, consortia, and associations. With this broad understanding comes the ability to find a path into productive collaboration. (And I couldn’t really help myself from referencing Lorcan Dempsey’s recent work on soft skills as timely in supporting the development of this type of organization) Building team cohesion, nurturing cross-unit understanding, and developing adaptive thinking isn’t just valuable. It’s essential.

So within the context of my three meta themes, we ended the morning with a rich conversation about leading through ambiguity and change. And while (like ZSR) the UNC-G library, NCSU’s D. H. Hill Library, and parts of UNC Charlotte’s library are under renovation this summer, I was reminded again that it’s not the buildings, but the people within them, who shape our future.