Most professional librarians, even recent graduates, manage something, whether it be a project, service, department, or a whole library. This book explains the different managerial roles at libraries, looking at the levels of managers, what they do, and how they do it. The goal is to explore the unique challenges faced by different types of library managers, in order to prepare early and mid-career librarians to step into new roles, and to think about how they might progress toward upper-management in a library.

The approach is practice-driven, with a particular focus on the soft skills that are needed to be successful as a manager.

Library Management: A Practical Guide for Librarians features three parts:

project management, middle management, and upper management.

These sections cover the different kinds of challenges that face people at each level of their career, exploring how these challenges can help prepare librarians for promotion to the next level. The purpose of these sections is to show how management skills develop over the course of one’s career, and to explore how leaders changes from context to context. Though each section focuses on a particular level of authority, the lessons can be useful for and applied to all of the levels discussed. For example, the same librarian might fill different roles in different contexts. A dean might serve as a library’s executive, but also manage a university-wide project or a middle manager might step into the role of dean temporarily, or might wonder what the next level of management would require.