A Day in the Life of a 2025 Academic Library Director
“Bing,” your phone buzzes.
You’ve been waiting for an email all week, so your snatch your phone out of your pocket faster than you can instinctively swat a fly.
The email!
“We finally got the confirmation — we are meeting with the Investment Firm this Sunday!”
Your fingers are typing faster than you knew was possible; you’ve been thinking about this email all week.
“Fantastic — let’s set it up for the conference room at the library this Thursday.”
Since you operate the local, Academic Library, it is your job to ensure all the local businesses that utilize the workspaces are properly booked for any meetings and other purposes.
The building includes a clean, white workspace, where clubs, organizations, and various students find haven for each of their respective assignments. The conference rooms are located on the 3rd floor, and include a long, wooden table surrounded by ergonomic, black, leather chairs. These are available by appointment, and have been used by the likes of student startups to club meetings alike.
A membership at this library is included in the tuition of the University and includes 24/7 access to the building, and an online database filled with various publications, including various eBooks and Journals.
As the Academic Library Director, it is primarily your job to curate accessible information for students. The include journals and databases are chosen based on their application to student research, and practical affordability. Considering the cost of each source of information, you compute algorithms to decide which sources should be included, and which should either be removed or negotiated. In a recent finding, your library faces a serious issue: students often only utilize one or two sources from a massive database in a year, and the cost of paying a membership for the database has far exceeded the marginal benefit for each student. As a result, you negotiated an access-based payment plan. As the number of students that utilize a database increases, the amount the database is paid increases accordingly. This creates mutual benefit for both parties, as your library is not paying exorbitant amounts to maintain a database for a single use, and the database has the opportunity to be paid much more than the regular membership amount.
Where books primarily filled the library in years prior, there is a vast, open workspace. As Eli Neiburger mentioned, books are becoming obsolete to the ease of online access. As mentioned in Many larger tables include an embedded tablet on which this information can be easily accessed. Furthermore, anyone connected to the University WiFi may access the same sources through a University Intranet Page. While books are hardly used compared to online sources, there is still a designated section for highly sought-after print texts. Furthermore, the Library has an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) program with other schools, so that all institutions may access a book, if needed.
A paramount driver of the success of this library is that information is widely accessible through the Library’s intranet. By moving books away from the library, it creates a much larger workspace for collaboration and industry. As a result, students tend to congregate around these spaces freely, and members of local businesses often utilize the available space to connect with students. This has created a two-pronged approach, which appeals to both the student mentality to work freely, and hiring processes, where businesses can connect with young adults, soon to enter their respective industries.
At the end of the day, the Academic Library Director wears many hats, among which include curating information, planning events, and connecting students to the professional world.