By now, you may have heard about a new American Library Association initiative called ALA Forward, but have you wondered how it will be used to reinvigorate the organization? On this show, Dan Montgomery, Executive Director of the American Library Association, shares details about ALA Forward, an initiative designed to unite and strengthen the work of libraries, and he explains how all of us can get involved.
Transcript
This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast, where we talk about libraries and leadership and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations and strategic insights in the profession.
By now you may have heard about a new American Library Association initiative called ALA Forward, but have you wondered how it will be used to reinvigorate the organization? On this show, Dan Montgomery, Executive Director of the American Library Association, shares details about ALA Forward, an initiative designed to unite and strengthen the work of libraries—and he explains how all of us can get involved.
Enjoy the show.
Hello, Dan, welcome to the show.
Dan Montgomery:
Hi, Adriane, thank you. I really appreciate you having me on.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: I appreciate you being here. Today we are going to talk about ALA Forward. As we start will you share how this initiative originated? 00:55
Dan Montgomery:
It started before I became Executive Director. I started in early November of last year, so I’m still pretty new. But really, going back post-COVID a couple years ago, I think the Executive Board of the ALA recognized a few things. One, the ground has shifted for all of us in this country, in many spheres—in many domains, not just libraries and librarianship, but the public domain of our nation in many ways. The ALA also was looking at budget deficits that were pretty significant. There was a growing realization among leadership within the ALA that the organization was coming up—and this year, in fact, is our 150th anniversary. I know we’ll talk about that hopefully in a bit, but a couple of years ago—looking ahead, the board and other leaders in the ALA said, Look, we’re coming up to 150 years. We’ve been adding and adding, and adding, and adding, to what we do over 150 years—and it’s not sustainable. We’ve got to, at some point, winnow through what must we keep doing? What can we do better? What do we have to change to meet the times? Things like that—and then certainly, with the budget deficit, you just can’t keep doing the same thing, right? That’s as far as I understand—not to speak for people who were there then, but that’s essentially the impetus of it.
Then there was a big organization-wide effort. They worked with some organizational design consultants. They talked to everybody from past presidents, rank-and-file members, member leaders, staff—elected officials, all those constituent groups to come up with a strategic plan to reform the ALA to make it fit the times better, and certainly also to make it to last another 150 years. So, I come in, frankly, charged with finishing the process—executing that strategic plan. It began before I got here, meaning the execution of it began—design elements and things like that, working on a new ALA Forward began before I got here, but we’re in the thick of it.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: We definitely want ALA to go on for the next 150 years. So, your charge is a good one. What are the priorities of ALA Forward? 03:30
Dan Montgomery:
Before I get to the real precise answer there, I want to say something though, about—in my background, coming from education and labor, many of us in the world at large, and certainly librarians can have a healthy skepticism about strategic plans. And, rightfully so, right? I’ve been parts of organizations, or worked in organizations that underwent strategic plans that didn’t go well. But, I’ve also been parts of organizations where it really went well. In fact, that’s my experience leading that change in my former organization, the Illinois Federation of Teachers. I think that’s one reason the board chose me. I said to the board about this subject something I’d said in my previous work as well, and actually, it’s really a take on something Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential historian, has written.
She was asked what makes a great president? She said, Well, they all share this sort of common feature that they understand themselves and the times they live in, or lived in. I analogize that to organizations as well. If we’re going to be a great organization. We’ve got to know who we are and the times we’re in. And, you bring those things together, so they’re consonant. I think that’s the job of ALA Forward—is figuring out, understanding who are we? Who do we want to be? Who can we be, and how does that intersect with the times we live in? That’s kind of my preface—that’s the effort of ALA Forward writ large.
But, it has a few core elements, and here’s what they are. The first one, I would say, is developing the library workforce pipeline; career awareness; recruitment campaigns; education. That’s something the ALA has been working on forever. Our members who are familiar with Spectrum Scholars or the Emerging Leaders Program, those are things that we’ve done along those lines. This is something everybody thinks about in the world now—education, the labor movement, corporations in the world we are in. You hear a lot about the next Gen, Alpha Gen, Gen Z, the new workforce and what it’s like for them. So, that’s something we’ve always got to work on.
Another point isinnovation and technology adoption and helping members thrive through that. AI is something that we can’t escape. It’s in the world now. I don’t think there’s putting a genie back in the bottle in terms of AI, but we’ve got to have guardrails around it. We’ve got to help library workers and patrons, for that matter, understand the contours of it and get trained in it. There’s a big ALA group from the ALA Council right now working on developing guidelines for AI within our world.
Then two big things in addition—expanding advocacy efforts, so that libraries and librarian’s voices and library worker’s voices are heard in the big din of public discourse. I think it’s really one of the most important things we have to do. It’s never been not in the ALA charge. Right? That’s not a new thing. Since its inception 150 years ago, that’s one of the core reasons ALA exists, right? But now more than ever, everything from book bans to budget cuts, there’s reasons to have our members prepared to advocate at every level—federal, state, local. So, that’s a huge part of it.
And finally, community programs to support members and society at large. Those last two things I put together, Adriane, as member advocacy, if you will. I’ve said this a number of times—in a membership organization like ours, a professional association, the members have to see themselves in the organization, right? They have to think like, Man, the ALA is my professional home. I think most members do feel that, but I think we have to strengthen that. I want to grow membership. We need to grow membership. That has something to do with the budget issues I mentioned earlier. That’s a big part of it. That entails advocacy, right? If you’re out there in the world helping—I mean, gosh, we’ve been going to court to support IMLS, and other Rights to Read, and things like that, and the foundation, which was endowed through the ALA, does that—the Freedom to Read Foundation. And man, we’ve been parts of a lot of lawsuits, very successfully.
But, it’s also just the everyday librarian, library worker, feeling like, Yeah, okay, I get this information from the ALA, or I get to go to this conference, or what have you—that it becomes my professional home. So, those are the big things. I think probably most members might, if you’ve been a long time member, you might hear those things and say, Well, that’s kind of what we’ve always been to some degree. But, you have to do it in a different way in the environment we’re in now. Younger people—not just younger people, everybody, they’ve got their phones. I have a blue case so you can’t see it. But, how do we live in this world where there’s information overload constantly? It seems like there’s so much dysfunction and disruption in parts of our society. There are, in fact, disruptions that it’s easy for people to question. We see this distrust in government, and institutions, and things like that. So, it’s the right time for the ALA to readjust, recalibrate, do healthy self-examination about what we do and how effective it is. So, that’s what we’re in.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: Those are huge aspects of looking at where we are now and looking forward to where we are going. But will you share how the ALA’s historic bedrock values are carried forward today? 09:59
Dan Montgomery:
The ALA has a librarian. It’s a very, very nice and competent person named Colleen Barbus, who’s actually on staff—she’s the librarian for the ALA. There is an ALA library within the institution. But also, we have an archivist at the University of Illinois and things like that. But I asked Colleen one day, I said, Hey, give me—I’m not a librarian, right? Which is one reason I think the board brought me in to have outside eyes, if you will. My expertise is in education and leading organizations, advocacy, and member organizations. So I said, You know, I want to learn more about libraries, the history of the ALA, and things like that.
Well, she’s a librarian. She’s really good. The next week I went in and there was a—I’m holding my hands far apart, a stack of books this tall on my desk. All great things that I’m working my way through. But one of the essential—if you go back to the founding, 150 years ago of the ALA, and then at various points in our history, the 30’s and 50’s, especially, one of the core bedrock and founding principles is the advocacy of the Freedom to Read, the right to access information in this country unobstructed for any American or any person who lives in this country, even non-citizens. Right? That’s the great public good that libraries provide in the nation. You use the term bedrock. That’s the term I use. I say, Look, libraries and the Freedom to Read are bedrocks of democracy—the foundational bedrock of our democracy. For the democracy to function, we need those principles protected and strengthened.
We learn, and if we haven’t learned now we should be learning, that you cannot take democracy for granted, right? I think that’s something that’s happened a lot. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about this. Americans are almost too insulated—we’re not in Europe. We’re not in other parts of the world where democracy has been a contested value, arguably in this country the same way it has in other places. But, it is now. To use the famous Lincoln phrase, a rebirth of freedom, right? It takes, to me, a rebirth of democracy, and a rebirth of the central belief that information is the currency of democracy. We have to fortify that in our libraries.
As in other times in our nation, we’re seeing more book bans, we’re seeing more efforts to curtail, not even just via book bans, but places where state governments, or local governments want to pass laws restricting even a library’s access to the ALA—things like that. So, that’s very scary. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that thinks the response to that should be hunkering down and hiding. We have to make this argument with the public.
I would say I want our members, and people listening, to have faith it is an argument and a value that the public, the American public, believes in very deeply. It’s easy to think that, Oh my gosh there’s some tide in this country that everyone wants book bans. All the evidence shows us that those efforts are driven by a very small minority. in fact, in many cases—the same kind of groups of people doing the same thing in many places.
So, I’m not minimizing it. I’m not saying we shouldn’t fight it with all we got. We have to, but that advocacy, that bedrock principle is fundamental to the ALA. It undergirds everything. One of the things that’s happened with our financial situation before I came on board, there were layoffs of staff and things like that. If you’re losing millions of dollars a year, you can’t sustain yourself, so we had to do that. And, not just lay off people, but refigure, What are we doing? Some programs can be compressed and combined, things like that. And, that’s painful because no one likes change, right? If you’ve experienced your organization one way throughout your career, it’s easy to hope and think and dream that it’ll never change—it will always be that way, but we can’t. There’s not going to be an ALA unless we make these changes.
So, the changes—it’s all in how you do it. How you strengthen what you’re doing. We unfortunately have to do more with less. Like our own members do in libraries every day, unfortunately—in schools, in other places, universities. One of the charges I have—one of the things I think about a lot, pretty much every day is how, in that context, we strengthen what we’re doing externally around academic freedom, intellectual freedom, the right to read, the right to access information freely, the support for libraries in the nation as a whole.
We have strengthened the Office of Intellectual Freedom, that’s an office within the ALA. It’s a little department—is probably the best way to think of it. I came in and saw that there had been, not only because of layoffs, but because I think the fear around the world we’re in with book bans—there were people questioning, Gosh, is the ALA there on this issue? My take on it is, of course, we’re there on this issue. That’s why we were founded. If any staff changes, or whatever, that doesn’t change your fundamental core principles. In fact, we’ve now got a woman named Sarah Lamdan, who is the head of our—I’ve named her Executive Director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom to uplift her stature. We’ve reconfigured that office. It now lives within what’s called the PPA, the Public Policy and Advocacy Office based in Washington.
Sarah Lamdan is a superstar rock star in the world of intellectual freedom—law professor, just a great advocate. I have said to Sarah, We need more partnerships. No one can go it alone in this world. We gotta work with everyone and anyone who’s interested in protecting intellectual freedom and the right to access information freely in this country. And, that’s the effort she’s leading out of that office. But, it’s many parts of the ALA. So, I don’t know—that’s a lot of words, but I hope you get a flavor of how deeply important that work is to the ALA. And I think, by the way, we’ve really had a lot of success in that work in this very tough environment.
Before I came here, in the teacher union I led, we had to get involved in school board races like we’d never done. Why? Because, the challenge was brought to us. Some people have greatness thrust upon them, as Shakespeare said, and there are some fights you can’t run from because it’s brought right to your door. When you have certain groups, Moms for Liberty, or there was a group in Illinois called Awake Illinois, trying to run in school boards so that they could take over school boards to do things like ban books or close libraries to children in schools, or essentially cut the educational program because it didn’t meet, say, their religious objectives. We had to fight that. And, we won those races.
The great lesson I learned in all that is, if you go to these school board meetings and the same is at library boards as well, in the town square, city hall, and things like that—the vast majority of Americans don’t want this going on in their public institutions. They don’t want library board meetings where the police have to be called because there’s screaming and threats. They want their public services available to their kids. They want public services available for the greater good of their community. We have to have faith in that. It’s not always easy, but it’s something we have to completely think through every day how we manage that.
And God bless all our members who do that every day on the front lines. There’s that great—you may have seen The Librarians already. I think it’s such a great movie because it really shows in a granular way, like in one community, even though it covers a few communities, but especially this one community—all the dynamics of that. I try to talk up that movie everywhere I can because it’d be great for all Americans, especially this—I love that our 150th anniversary coincides with the country’s 250, right? Because, it just strengthens that idea that the bedrock of libraries and what we do is a bedrock of the whole country and our democracy.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: I have seen that movie, and we’ve screened it in my library for the public. Being in Park City as a venue for Sundance, Kim A. Snyder, the film’s director, was in town and invited my team of librarians to come to one of the original screenings. We were lucky to be in on the ground floor for that. Given what we’re talking about here, the multiplying challenges facing libraries, what is your call to action for librarians and library workers regarding the ALA? 19:42
Dan Montgomery:
Join ALA, if you haven’t already. Get your colleagues to join ALA, and your institutions to join ALA, if you haven’t already. And also, we have a huge fundraising campaign going on tied to our 150th anniversary. We’re in the process of raising millions, tens of millions of dollars. That’s our goal. But, that takes everybody. No donation is too small. I sound like I’m the Public Radio guy. It really is true.
When we get donations to the ALA, they take two forms. Oftentimes they’ll be foundations, or some group, or even people in their personal bequests and things like that, who will say, I want to fund Spectrum Scholars, or I want to fund something to do with capital campaigns and libraries. I mean, it runs the gamut of everything.
Then there’s also donations where it’s unrestricted. We believe in the ALA, the work of its members—here’s a donation to keep the ALA sustaining.They’re all valuable, and they’re all needed. So, I just think, again, the 150th, to me, a donation to the ALA is a celebratory act of American greatness, if you will. The things that I think most Americans believe are great—the freedoms that we enjoy. So, that’s one thing, and that’s a certain kind of advocacy, right? You’re saying we need to support this institution, as an individual member, I need it because it supports me in my professional work. That’s one thing.
Another thing is the kind of trainings we do. We just had, in December, in Rosemont, Illinois—which is right next to O’Hare, so it’s a good place central in the country for people to get to. We had, I’m trying to think of the exact number—I want to say it was, maybe, around 200, maybe it was 300 members in to do advocacy training—like a chapter advocacy training. In your state, how do we equip you to make change, to go to the statehouse, to advocate for Right to Read bills, and to advocate against bad bills and things like that? That was so great because one, you’re giving people really concrete skills that they can use that are really lifelong skills. How do you advocate in a legislative space?
The other part of it was you had someone from one state talking to their neighbors from the neighboring state, and that neighboring state had already passed that bill that’s now coming to the other state. That happens, right, on both good and bad ideas. Legislators from states share things both good and bad. That cross interstate discussion was really valuable.
Those sorts of trainings—and we need people to—it’s not only federal, but it’s state and local advocacy. We need them to be trained to do that. It’s not hard to learn how to do. I think if you haven’t done it, it can be daunting. Some librarians and library workers are like, Oh, I don’t know, that’s not really me. I’m not an aggressive person, or I don’t like to. I’m not—sales isn’t my thing and it feels like sales or whatever objections you might think about. I think once you learn what it can look like, there’s room for everybody. If you get a group of your colleagues to go meet with your local state legislator, that doesn’t mean everybody has to talk. Sometimes it’s really powerful to have five of you walk in that office, sit down and meet with the state legislator. As long as one or two of you are briefed and know how to approach it, it’s all good.
That sort of thing we’re doing and we’re going to do that every year. And, it’s an ongoing thing, and we work with the chapters in every state to try to make that valuable and alive. In addition, we do have a Legislative Library Day. I said, we’ve got to do this again. It’s something the ALA had done in the past. I think then it was a bit on hold. But, we’re doing it again this year where we have this Fly-In day. It’s on my calendar, I’ll be there in DC. We have hundreds of people from around the country. I think we’ve got all fifty states, or pretty darn close, represented. That’s in late February—excuse me, like the 25th, 26th February. In D.C. Again, we brief people. We get them to go to the Hill to talk to their representatives and senators. Those are just two concrete things in terms of advocacy that we do. Plus, there’s always lots of stuff on our website for people to go if you need more information.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: Thank you. And you’ve mentioned that 2026 marks the 150th birthday of the ALA. What does celebrating this mean for you and for the organization? 24:58
Dan Montgomery:
I can just tell you, Adriane, for me personally, I just feel honored and privileged to be here in this job at this moment. It’s amazing to me. It’s like a dream. I would say this in my union world too, because the world, externally, can feel really daunting and depressing at times to people, because we’re going through all this trauma about many things—everything from Minneapolis to budget cuts, and questions about what the future looks like. I would say to folks, then to union members, and I say it to ALA members now—I really mean this, it’s a privilege to be where we are right now. We weren’t here 150 years ago when the ALA was created, but we’re here now when we get to set the course for the next 150. So, we’re founders in a way, right?
George Saunders, I was at the National Book Awards in November, and George Saunders, the great writer, got an award there—Arts and Letters Award. He gave this great talk. He actually talked about editing because he’s a writer, right? But he said the reason that editing is so compelling—I think he called it a sacramental act, is because that’s what we do in our lives every day. We edit our lives. You wake up every day. It’s sort of a new day and you’re trying to—most people try to change their behavior to be more successful in their lives.
That’s where we are right now, at 150. We’re editing, and we’re reconfiguring the ALA for the future, but we also just get to celebrate 150 years, too. That’s just really special. It’s really great to be here for that. So that’s personally what it means to me.
Institutionally, it means everything from externally being able to say to people in the world at large like, Wow, libraries, aren’t they great? Did you remember how fundamental libraries are to America’s history—to America’s, insofar, as we’ve been a successful democracy? Which we have. Despite all our challenges, we’re still a democracy, less functional than we’ve been at some times in our past.
But, ALA is huge in libraries—are huge in that. So, it’s a great thing to celebrate. I think, again, to join that with the country’s semiquincentennial—I think is the word, that’s really cool. I hope people—it’s so easy to be downcast when you turn on the news right now in America, and in the world at large, and feel like everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. I feel that way too sometimes, but I hope that the 150th for our members, and the world at large, and all the people who love the ALA, and libraries who give—can see this as a great opportunity for a rebirth and a sense of reaffirmation of the work we do every day in libraries, and why they matter to democracy today.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: It is a great opportunity, and I hope all of us in libraries will take this moment to celebrate and get involved to reaffirm who we are. 28:26
Dan Montgomery:
Yeah, absolutely, and reaffirm what your local library is to your community. That’s what I want to remember is to feel they know this, but the vast majority of their community members are with them, or love them, and need the library. Right?
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: That’s right. Dan, an important thing to remember. Is there anything else you’d like to share? 28:50
Dan Montgomery:
We do the big ALA conference every year. It’s June 25th through 29th this year. It’s in Chicago, which is my hometown. I also think it’s the greatest big city in America. It’s going to be fantastic. It’s our 150th. There’s everything from big parties, big celebrations, really cool stuff that I can’t mention right now because we’re going to reveal it as we go, but some amazing names of people who are coming, who are going to speak, who are going to appear. There’s all sorts of cool community things happening around it.
I got to go to the annual conference last year for the first time in Philadelphia, and I was blown away. I don’t know if you were there, Adriane, but it was actually over 14,000 people in attendance. Almost 10,000 of those people are ALA members, which is like off the charts. Most organizations—the percent of our members who are activists enough to come to conference and give up a week of their summer almost—is huge. Very few organizations have that level of engagement and activism.
I just encourage you, our members listening, or any interested people who want to come to the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in late June, to do it. It’s a great thing to do. We’ve had this polar vortex here in Chicago. I guarantee you it’ll be warmer in June. There we go.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: It’ll absolutely be warmer in June, and I hope so many people will be there. It’s a stunning thing to see in person. Dan, do you have any books or resources you’d like to share and why? 30:27
Dan Montgomery:
You can find all sorts of things in the American Libraries magazine, on our web page— ALA.org. Including for members. We started our conversation, Adriane, talking about ALA Forward, the new strategic plan and where we’re going. It’s called ALA Forward. There’s member updates online, but that is for members, so you’ve got to be a member to log in to that.
It’s one of the charges I have is to communicate even more about that. When an organization is undergoing changes, you just can’t overcommunicate. And, it’s hard and I think in the past, sometimes, we haven’t been as good as we could in communicating why changes are taking place, what are they, what are we doing as a membership organization? So, trying to do a lot of communication.
Book? I’m someone who—I read lots of things all at once. I’ll have a few books going at once. That’s just kind of how I operate, along with magazines and newspapers. I’m still one of those people that likes to read a hard copy of a newspaper every day. But I’ll tell you, here’s a book that I think about a lot in reference to ALA. I really recommend it. Timothy Snyder’s, On Freedom, I think it’s his last book, but I’m not 100% certain about that. I’ve seen him speak a bunch. We’ve had him at Union stuff in the past, but the reason that I mentioned that book is because it’s pretty philosophical about—he makes this distinction between negative and positive freedoms.
We think of negative freedoms is eliminating those things that get in the way of reading— like, we have to end book bans, right? There’s a different way to think about that, that I invite people to think about. I think it’s important for the ALA to behave this way. That is, it’s more potent to think about the positive freedom of the Freedom to Read, as opposed to just playing whack-a-mole and saying, Okay, end this book ban. Get rid of that book ban. Helping all Americans understand that the Freedom to Read, and the freedom you have as an individual to access information without hindrance and obstruction by anybody—a government or an individual, is core to who you have to be, want to be, and can be as a human individual that’s part of this great country.
That’s a really powerful distinction, I just think that’s a great way—because it’s easy to talk about we have Banned Books Week, right? Which is an important thing, but I honestly, I have to tell you sometimes I think to myself, I wonder if we really should call it Banned Books Weeks, Banned Books Week, because that plays a little bit into the negative freedom, right? When what we want to fortify in people around the country is this belief in the positive freedom, of my freedom to go into that library and choose any book I want, or see any book I want, or know that the library is not hiding certain books because someone thinks that I shouldn’t see it, because it might be bad for me. Let me decide, right? So, that’s one of the things that I’ve thought about a lot in context of this work that we do at the ALA.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: Thank you for those core value recommendations. I appreciate that. Dan, in closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 33:46
Dan Montgomery:
I just feel so lucky in my life. I’ve been the beneficiary of tremendous public education. Not only did—I need to say this, my parents, neither of whom went to college. I grew up in Detroit, in suburban Detroit, and neither went to college, but they read. They read. My mom took college courses sort of later in life. My dad and mom were both just highly self-educated, but they also were the beneficiary of public school teachers who looked out for them.
My dad was an only child. His parents died, kind of young. His public school teachers in the city of Detroit bought him shoes, and clothing, and advanced him, and gave him awards because he was such a good student. That encouraged him. My siblings, will all tell you the same thing. My mom, my dad, we’re always reading really interesting things, and taking us to the public library where we grew up. Every Sunday I’d go with my dad to the public library, and he’d leave with a stack of books, and I’d leave with a stack of books and sometimes eight-millimeter movies because they had those then, and I watched old silent comedies on eight-millimeter film, and I thought that was really cool.
Then great public schools—the library—it was in the early 70s. The public school building I went to in my elementary was one of those funky 70s buildings. It had round classrooms. But you know what was in the middle of that building? The library, it was built that the library was at the center of this ring of classrooms. The library was at the center.
I went to the University of Michigan and spent a heck of a lot of time in library. I was an English major. The Chicago Public Library, one of the great library systems in the world—taking our kids to the public library there. I was fortunate. I taught in Skokie, Illinois, at great public schools, and a great public library in Skokie. I’m that teacher who would when we’re doing the research paper—those weeks I’d be in the Skokie Public Library in the evening to meet my students. So, it’s just, I don’t know, it’s central to life. It’s central to being someone who’s connected to the world, because that world is available to you in the library.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #10: Libraries at the center. They are really at the center of so many things. That’s why I’m so glad we’re talking today, Dan. Thank you for being here with me and sharing a bit about ALA Forward so that we keep libraries at the center, and we’re all in the know about how this initiative is going to help us all move forward together. 36:19
Dan Montgomery:
Thank you. I really appreciate—this was really fun. And I just, Adriane, I appreciate what you do for libraries and your podcasts as well. And, these things that we all—that mean so much to us in our daily lives. It’s fun to think about those kind of warm thoughts about how much we love libraries and reading. We don’t have to think about some of the negative things out in the world there, we’re thinking about the positives.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #11: It is fun to think about the positive. Thanks again for being here, Dan. We’ll see you at ALA Annual. We’re looking forward to having all of us in the library profession come together in this spectacular year. So thanks again. 37:05
Dan Montgomery:
Thank you so much. Take care.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership Podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune into Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right into your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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