CHICAGO — As our communities grow more diverse, leadership positions in the library must reflect the changing makeup of our culture.
“Leadership in Libraries: A Focus on Ethnic-minority Librarians,” published by Chandos Publishing and available through Neal-Schuman Publishers, highlights the need to expand traditional views of leadership positions to embrace minorities. Aimed at anyone interested in cross-cultural leadership, it both gives real-world examples of the particular challenges facing minorities and provides those in the dominant culture with tools to understand their own role in maintaining the status quo. Probing library school programs and their efforts to develop leadership skills among librarians in general, and among minority librarians in particular, author Maha Kumaran introduces the concept of ethnic-minority leadership, defining it in terms of culture, profession and gender. She then profiles several successful minority leaders in different fields and offers statistical data on minorities and librarians in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. An engaging and valuable sourcebook for keeping pace with changing cultures, this book addresses a topic important for any librarian working toward becoming a leader.
Kumaran is the Saskatchewan health information resources partnership librarian at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. She was previously the virtual reference librarian at Saskatoon Public Library (SPL), and has also served as the adult/young adult librarian at SPL. She has worked in Canadian libraries for the last 16 years.
ALA Store purchases fund advocacy, awareness and accreditation programs for library professionals worldwide. Founded in 1976 by Patricia Glass Schuman and John Vincent Neal, Neal-Schuman Publishers, now an imprint of ALA Publishing, publishes professional books for librarians, archivists, and knowledge managers. Contact us at (800) 545-2433 ext. 5418 or editionsmarketing@ala.org.
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