Creativity: A Toolkit for Academic Libraries

Use creativity to create change in your library!

Creativity is the ability to produce a product or idea that is both new and appropriate in a given context, and is essential for innovation, change, and employee satisfaction. Creativity is inherently human, a transferable skill that can be developed and that can improve an individual's personal and professional life regardless of their level of artistic ability, education, or experience.

Academic libraries are often the first to face budget reductions, hiring freezes, and staff reductions when higher education encounters financial stress, and creativity can seem like either a luxury or an attempt to spur libraries to support the needs of their institution without adequate staff and funding. However, creativity is vital at all levels of the academic library if that library expects to adapt to the current challenges facing higher education. Change is necessary for adaptation, and creativity is essential for change.

Creativity: A Toolkit for Academic Libraries can help you create, encourage, and participate in an environment that is conducive to creativity, helping make change a more natural and organic part of the library's culture. The first part, Understanding Creativity, looks at the psychology of creativity and its use in design thinking, innovation, research, and physical and social environments. The second, Creativity in Context, examines perspectives of library staff and creativity in academic library literature, and how to enhance personal creativity and foster it in your library.

Greater creativity in librarianship—and creating a culture that values trial and error along with successes—needs to be encouraged by those in library leadership, in the library profession more broadly, and in institutions of higher education. Creativity: A Toolkit for Academic Libraries can be the first step in developing your own creativity and advocating for it across your institution.

Nancy Falciani-White has worked in liberal arts college libraries for almost twenty years, beginning as a student employee in the interlibrary loan office of her college library. She was hired as interlibrary loan coordinator and promoted to reference and instruction librarian and then department head before moving to Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia to become Library Director. She received her MSLIS degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her EdD in Instructional Technology from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. Her research interests include creativity, the intersection of research and technological innovation, and academic library leadership. She has been published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Journal of Documentation as well as several edited volumes.