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Library buildings are routinely reimagined, remodeled, or built new to meet the changing needs of their community. The move from collection-centric to user-centric service models has generated numerous writings about the library as place and space. The one concept lacking in the scholarly discourse is the changing roles of librarians to meet the needs of these new spaces and places. How do librarians fit in the new equation? When addressing the professional identity of librarians, which aspect of their work will need to evolve and which will need to be let go? A critical facet of sustaining services in new spaces is the need to develop the sustainable librarian – to remove the stigma of the librarian as “jack of all trades, master of none.” In order to realize this new mindset of mastering our domain we need to begin reimagining our work. Some ways, this can be accomplished by writing increased flexibility into position descriptions and creating organizational structures to better support librarians within the new spaces. With these new developments to our professional identities, librarians may learn to employ entrepreneurial skills in order to continuously anticipate services and develop skill sets to aid the library’s ability to fulfill its purpose. The authors provide a literature review to discuss the changing role of the academic librarian to meet the evolution of the library building and services. We will provide an example through findings and practices of Grand Valley State University and how it reimagined roles in the early 2000s and continues to reimagine roles in a new building and a renovated branch library. The change of spaces and places in academic libraries to accommodate user needs and perceptions has impacted how academic librarians work in these spaces and places. Library administrators need to rethink workflows, and organizational charts by examining flexible workloads, cross-training initiatives, professional development around new skills, and the letting go of obsolete practices.

Originality/value – in this chapter, the authors will discuss how library leaders are charged with translating the new roles of their librarians to meet the needs of their community in these new spaces and how library leaders may look beyond the literature of the profession for ways to facilitate change.

As academic libraries face growing challenges from the declining economy, deteriorating administrative support, increasing patron demands and fiscal accountability, as well as the expanding competition from both technology and retail industries, there is an opportunity to be more responsive to academic library customers and more strategic in the services provided to them. A boutique service model, generally, employed in high-end retail industries, may be adapted for academic libraries to provide a proactive, specialized approach to serving faculty and students. In the context of libraries, this model is focused on service that is personalized, user-driven, and technology-enhanced. It can be employed with the efforts of subject librarians and library personnel with minimal additional cost and would have a profound impact on the customer service experience. This chapter describes how the Policy Sciences & Economics Library at Texas A&M University (TAMU) has successfully implemented a boutique services model. It discusses the emphasis on a customer-intimacy strategy, focusing on relationship building of the Library and liaison librarians with its customers, the faculty, and students of the Departments of Political Science and Economics and the Bush School of Government and Public Service. A number of collaborative projects and services have been borne out of this effort and the result has been a measure of embeddedness that permeates the curriculum and research activities of those serves and increases the effectiveness and impact of the services provided by the library. The various efforts and innovations are easily transferable and scalable to other types of libraries.

Although a great deal has been written about the challenges and opportunities for collaboration between librarians and professors in higher education, most recommendations for faculty–library collaboration are written by librarians, published in librarian-oriented venues, and rely on second-hand accounts of professorial perceptions and experiences. Dialogue between librarians and professors is missing. In this chapter, the authors present a duoethnographic inquiry into a librarian–professor collaboration: the authors collaboratively examine their four years working together on the senior seminar course “Small Business Management” at Acadia University, Canada. In considering the evolution of their course and their collaboration, the authors reflect on six dimensions of their experiences: the way their collaboration has shaped the course learning outcomes, the value the authors have derived from collaboratively reflexive teaching, the workload tensions the authors have navigated, the challenge of “fitting in,” and the role of library champion. The authors then conclude with four insights from their professorial–librarian collaboration that might be transferable to other contexts of higher education: the importance of openness, collegiality, time for collaboration, and attention to the cultural gaps between professorship and librarianship.

This chapter provides an overview of the space reimagining that has occurred in a mid-size library that serves both the life and social sciences at a large research university. Projects are introduced that have transformed physical and virtual spaces from preprogrammed areas and services designed to serve librarian-defined needs to an open and flexible architecture that better incorporates and facilitates the projects, ideas, and interest-driven learning initiated by users. As we move from “library as place” to “library as platform” (Bennett, 2003; Weinberger, 2012), the library becomes a central location for users to connect with and learn from one another, create and remix, display and discuss their work, and capture and preserve community knowledge.

The authors examine various initiatives in the library to demonstrate the role of library space. Each initiative is framed as a case study to illustrate how librarians have responded to user needs and the impact that these changes have had on management in libraries.

The change in focus to “library as platform” requires flexible and flat library management, additional staff roles, and changing paradigms of library space and skills.

This chapter adds to the body of case studies examining what the library of the future could look like in practice as well as theory.

With the globalization of education and immigration, international students have become a large population group at universities in the United States. However, language issues, adjusting to a new educational system, and culture shock are still big challenges for most international students. As a former international student majoring in Library and Information Science, the author deeply understands the difficulties that these students go through to achieve academic success in the United States. Therefore, when the author began working as the Liaison Librarian for International Students at the University of South Alabama in 2014, her first goal was to develop a relationship with related departments on campus to provide library services for these students. This chapter will provide a glimpse of the library outreach program created especially for international students at the University of South Alabama. This chapter will also share the author’s professional experiences reaching out to different groups of international students and creating long-term collaborative working relationships with related departments on campus. The goal is to enable universities to create a welcoming library environment and provide services to support the academic success of all students.

This chapter aims to present best practices in providing inclusive resources and services offered to persons with disabilities at a public university library, in light of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

A review of past practices and future considerations are presented from the perspective of providing both effective services and acquiring accessible resources.

Effective practices, at a college library serving individuals with disabilities, need to be a consistent part of daily practices and policies. Due to changing populations of students with disabilities, library outreach to the local disability office and communication to library professionals is essential. Practices for acquiring, assessing, and purchasing library resources require conformity to legal standards in order to be an “accessible” library.

Success for college students with disabilities also requires an institutional and system-wide university commitment to accessibility. As a case study in practice, the College of Staten Island (CSI) Library actively assesses accessibility at their library, which can be relevant to other academic libraries.

Limited amount of studies document the application of compliance with the ADA to daily library acquisition practices. Initiatives are also presented that can lead to future procurement guidelines at the CSI and similar organizations.

After an overview of the literature on challenges facing library instructors and their coordinators, the chapter describes how the communities of practice model relates to professional development in librarianship, specifically in the area of instructional development. A case study of a community of practice fostered by an instruction coordinator at an academic library is detailed. Academic librarians may encounter several challenges when entering the classroom as library instructors, and instruction coordinators seek to address these and other challenges as they build library instruction programs. By developing a community of practice, instruction coordinators can enable library instructors to learn together. The case study describes how the Instruction Coordinator cultivates library instructor development for members of the Teaching and Learning Team at Loyola University New Orleans’ Monroe Library through a community of practice model. The practical implications for this chapter are that instruction coordinators can establish instructional development opportunities that allow library instructors to enhance their teaching abilities and ultimately further library instruction programs. Communities of practice are well known in several fields and have been discussed in the library literature. This chapter provides additional value to researchers and practitioners through the discussion and application of the concept in the context of library instruction at academic institutions. The case study provides specific examples of how instruction coordinators at other academic libraries can apply the community of practice model and instructional development opportunities to a library instruction program in order to build and sustain a learning culture that supports library instructor development.