Aspiring to Excel

Shali Zhang (’80) may have entered the library profession somewhat unpremeditated, but her trajectory since then has been very intentional. She’s worked her way up from a community college library in Kentucky to her current position as dean of Auburn University Libraries in Alabama. Every job change she’s made throughout her career has given her an opportunity to explore implement innovative services for patrons, as well as provided her with the next stepping stone in her professional journey.

“I moved to different settings and sizes of libraries in different positions. I think that kind of good preparation always helped me to take each next high-level position,” she said. “I have built up confidence in each position just enough to work there but to also think about, what are the priorities of the institution and the library, what kind of vision do they have, what kind of project can I take on?”

An Accidental Librarian

Upon graduating from Lanzhou University in China with an undergraduate degree in literature and linguistics, Zhang didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do next and was assigned to work in the University’s library.

“I went to the library to study a lot so the library director thought I might be a good worker,” Zhang says, with a chuckle, when retelling the story.

While she was working there, she met a group of University of Tennessee, Knoxville Graduate School and School of Information Sciences faculty members who were visiting her home university and its library. One thing led to another, and she decided to apply to the SIS master’s program at UT; she didn’t even bother to apply at any other schools. Looking back, she says the program at SIS was, and still is, one of the top programs in the United States—and she can say that with an amount of certainty that comes from several years of volunteering with the American Library Association (ALA), including as part of its accreditation committee and several site visits to other LIS programs.

“I still feel that the UT program is so good in terms of curriculum and experience. Especially in my time I feel I learned so much, I feel I was very lucky. It was a good program with a group of good professors; they really know how to teach and how to produce good librarians,” she said. “I’ve had the opportunity to read other programs’ information and I always feel that UT’s program is on the high-end of the spectrum in terms of its faculty, and curriculum, and student experience.”

Zhang said the professors weren’t just good instructors, but many were also kind. In particular, she said then-SIS Director Ann E. Prentice and Professor Gary Purcell invited her and several other international students to Thanksgiving dinners with their families during her years at UT, which she’ll never forget.

Academically, she enjoyed cataloging and took more than one cataloging class from faculty member George Sinkakas, and also conducted two independent study courses with him that resulted in work she used in her portfolio when applying to jobs. Her preparation paid off at her first job interview, where her skills and her degree from the SIS graduate program impressed the hiring committee.

“I was actually offered the job on-site that same day and they said ‘Oh wow, looks like you know a lot about cataloging.’ They knew I would know how to get to work on the first day,” she said.

That job as a technical services librarian kicked off the start of a career that would take her all around the country and allow her to expand her skillset and complete one achievement after another at each position.

Moving Up Through Libraries

The staff at her first job was fairly small and Zhang got up to speed quickly on the day-to-day workings- of the library—which helped when she became acting director for six months when the library director took leave for an overseas project.

“I learned so much through that experience. That also gave me some competence and made me not scared of working on things,” she said.

After that, she became library manager of the same community college’s off-campus library. It was then she began thinking about where she saw herself working in the future, and how she could work towards her goals. She missed the type of work she had done at Lanzhou University, which is a research university, and decided she wanted to maneuver herself back into that environment. She eventually did just that, and her resume includes positions at Ohio Wesleyan University Libraries, University of South Carolina Spartanburg Library, Wichita State University Libraries, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and most recently as dean of libraries and professor at the University of Montana. Amidst all of that, she also earned her doctorate in education from Kansas State University.

At each position, Zhang said she always considered what the needs of the patrons and the institution were, as well as the vision stakeholders had for the libraries where she worked. This type of approach has helped her complete a variety of projects, such as the Academic and Cultural Enrichment Scholars Program at UNC Greensboro, which she directed and managed as assistant dean of the library. The project focused on diversity recruitment and was funded by two federal grants from the Institute of Museums and Library Services, totaling $1.8 million. She particularly enjoyed this project because it had an almost 100-percent success rate in placing graduates into jobs.

“I worked with 10 library directors in that region to set up internships and mentoring programs with them, so students in that program also had the opportunity to have internships in those libraries, so by the time they graduate, they’re ready. The program was very successful,” she said, noting that the program also provided for the cohorts to go to conferences and learn soft skills such as how to interview for jobs.

Forward Progress

In her three years serving as dean of Auburn University Libraries, Zhang has taken the same approach of assessing the needs of those who use the library and then implementing services and resources to meet those needs. One of the first things she did upon starting the position was to survey the faculty about their research needs.

“Rather than each college department buying their own things, what can we have at the libraries to enable the entire campus to access technology and our services?” she asked. “In addition to the traditional ways that librarians support faculty, helping them find materials and search databases, we also wanted to establish research space, collaborative space, research tools, and specific research services to them.”

So she spearheaded a project to create an Innovation and Research Commons at the library that provides research services to everyone on campus, and she said it has already achieving good results. The space provides resources such as virtual reality and extended reality tools, for example. Another initiative is Data Space, which is a service wherein students taking language classes can get additional support from graduate students who are proficient in those languages.

Zhang has seen the landscape of librarianship change from analog to digital, and she’s seamlessly adapted to each new technology she’s encountered and figured out ways to utilize those technologies to best support students and faculty at the institutions where she’s worked. “Throughout my early 15 years I worked with several libraries with system migration, and that really helped me with technology and to learn how technology can access and discover library materials. It also planted a seed in my mind and every place I go I always try to find innovation, innovative ways to help our students,” she said.

She may have a few decades of experience, but that doesn’t mean she’s not on top of what is new and exciting in the world of library and information sciences. Her penchant for incorporating new technologies and opportunities into library spaces hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“At the University of Montana, the provost was doing my annual evaluation and he always put one word as my character, it was ‘innovation,’ and I feel good about that,” she said.•