Susan H. Hildreth was appointed director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) by President Barack Obama on January 19, 2011. Her nomination had been confirmed by the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent on December 22, 2010. Prior to joining IMLS, Hildreth served as Seattle city librarian, California state librarian, and San Francisco city librarian, as well as president of the Public Library Association in 2006. Under her leadership, IMLS made $857,241,000 in total grants to libraries and museums. As Hildreth’s four-year term draws to a close, she shares with LJ some of what she learned at the head of the institute and what she hopes the library community will build on in the future.

SH: Early in my tenure here, we needed to develop a strategic plan, and we did, in 2012. That plan has guided our work and investments over the last four years.

We developed some key messages about the relevance and capacity of libraries and museums, focusing on learning: libraries as real community hubs and also the myriad challenges and opportunities to providing access to content.

I’ve also had other people in the field mention to me that they’ve used some of our work and our language around those themes to help them express the priorities of libraries in their communities.

I’m very proud of our continuing investments in early learning. We’ve developed a great partnership with the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, which led to the publication of “Growing Young Minds: [How Museums and Libraries Create Lifelong Learners]” in June 2013. That document ­really highlights the contributions and potential in libraries and museums as early learning partners in communities. We know that a lot of our libraries have used it to help start a discussion with their policymakers. It and our investments in early learning have helped us provide the foundation for our current work with an organization called the BUILD Initiative.

Most states have at least some kind of standard benchmarks that they have to achieve for early learners, and we’re trying to align what we’re doing in libraries and museums with what’s required, because we do so much already. It’s not that far off to help some of our folks in the early learning field make an impact.... And that work, of course, is ongoing.

When I came to IMLS, we had just announced our great partnership with [the John D. and Catherine T.] MacArthur Foundation to support the learning labs, digital media centers, modeled on the New Media Center at the Chicago Public Library. I’ve been proud to be able to create 24 of these digital media labs in libraries and museums across the country. We’ve been working with MacArthur to support its priority of connected learning, and we’ve been able to help spread the word about their interest and their priority in badging—creating online systems for validation of informal learning. We’ve been trying to show that libraries and museums have a key role that they can play in [online education], and we provide a lot of informal and out of school education already.

The other thing I wanted to mention that has been helpful is that working with federal agency partners we’ve modeled collaboration that could be done at the state or local level. [There are] two key collaborations that we’re very proud of. This one predates my tenure here—working with the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration on workforce development. We were so excited with the workforce bill that passed, where libraries were identified and known to be key partners in workforce development.

Also, it was very impactful when we were able to develop the partnership with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services—the Health and Human Services Department manages the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. That was not an investment without some interest from many parties. Some libraries had begun to prepare for the impact of the Affordable Care Act rollout, and we were able to help libraries identify their key role in helping their communities navigate that information and get the best information out there....

We have a number of other federal partnerships as well. The library world is very complex, and our federal partners really need help navigating what’s ALA, what’s ACRL, what’s PLA, what’s ULC. We’ve been able to facilitate at least at the federal level a better understanding of the library universe.

The IMLS directorship is a fixed four-year term, and that is not coincident with the president’s incoming term. I was appointed by President Obama in the middle of his second term. It was challenging coming into an administration where I wasn’t really part of the incoming transition team, determining the key partners to work with, making sure that libraries and museums were part of the agenda of the administration and Congress.

IMLS is a great agency but not the most highly visible one, and in many situations, that’s good. But I also think coming in after the administration had kicked off some of its major policy initiatives, I had to determine how we could most effectively integrate what libraries and museums were doing to support those initiatives. We did a very good job doing that.

Another challenge, there are still some fairly traditional views of libraries and museums, and we know that we are constantly trying to counteract those. Early on in my time here, we began to work with some of the staff at the Office of Science and Technology Policy—advisors to the president on science and technology policy about Maker spaces and STEM [science, technology, engineering, math]. We’re creating a library and museum Maker community. We’ve made a number of STEM investments, and in terms of the president’s Maker initiative, IMLS is counted on as a very critical member of their inner agency working team to spread the word about STEM learning and Maker spaces to libraries and museums around the country.

I’ve been able to succeed at helping policymakers and other federal partners understand that we have this tremendous built asset of networks of libraries throughout the country that are poised to make a difference in their communities, and they’re doing it already. Often what will happen in discussion is that when you bring up libraries as a potential partner, no matter what the issue is, there’s usually not a reaction that, “Oh, I wouldn’t work with libraries.” It’s more like, “Oh, libraries. Why didn’t I think of libraries?” [We’re trying] to move us from entities that are under the radar and not thought of as partners to a place where we’re go-to community assets that can make a difference, frankly, no matter the content of the issue.

IMLS made an initial grant to [the American Library Association] to begin [its] work with civic engagement with its partner, the Harwood Institute. That now has been followed by a fairly significant investment by the [Bill & Melinda] Gates Foundation. The Harwood Institute approach is just one way for libraries beginning to look outward [to] understand that they must use their deep knowledge of their community to be proactive and also to respond to community needs.

While this has been going on for a number of years, libraries are becoming very adept and responsive to the needs of their communities and in many cases proactive—understanding that it’s not about what we in the library world might think is the right way to do things or what we might think our community needs. It’s about listening to our community and determining the priorities that our towns and cities or rural areas have and then determining how we can best meet those needs.

Over the four years that I’ve been here, I think that ALA and other stakeholder groups have made some good progress in terms of the e-content delivery situation. It was so tense for a while, and now we’re beginning to get the word across that we’re not in competition with print; we’re only going to augment the print and the ebook market. We’ve made a lot of progress in moving ahead in terms of providing information in all kinds of formats.

In our physical buildings, libraries have been very flexible in terms of how they use their spaces and responsive to the needs of their communities, as well as the changing nature of their collections. When I look at some of the libraries that are adopting Maker spaces and our libraries and museums that have benefited from our learning lab program, it’s fascinating to see how they’re using the space they have, repurposing in some cases to provide much more engaging active learning environments.

Building on those trends, how would you see them continuing or changing in the future?

Libraries provide great facilitation among their community members. And libraries are [basically] platforms for community conversations and community connections. Sometimes libraries have to some extent shied away from getting involved in intense community engagement [in terms of civic engagement] because when you do that, you can get involved in a political situation.

The library can provide a neutral open place where issues can be discussed face-to-face, where you bring different people together, and the library also has resources to help inform those discussions. If you’re going to do that effectively, the library staff have to be willing to understand what it means to be community dialog facilitators. It’s happening now, and it will continue to happen, because that particular role we play as trusted living rooms of the community will continue far into the 21st century.

I had a wide variety of experience in a number of different settings. I’ve worked in rural, suburban, and urban libraries. So I think my experience in the field prepared me well and helped me to know the field and understand how we might want to move forward. In serving as the state librarian of California, I had been one of the largest, if not the largest, grantee of [IMLS]. When you’re a grantee of the agency, you certainly have your own relationships, and you have a view of how things work. It’s always interesting then when you come on the other side and see how things work and how you can make a difference.

I’m able to state ideas, state policies, take issues, and communicate about them with the general public or with policymakers, so that they can understand what we’re trying to say. Sometimes we speak in our own language here, and we don’t make as much headway with folks who are not of our world as we might like to. I’ve had a lot of great experiences, but the time I spent in the San Francisco Public Library prepared me for public speaking of any and all kinds. I had some good innate skills, but that experience helped me fine-tune those communications skills.

In answering that, I want to refer to a series of convenings that we had earlier this year to take a look at our national leadership grant investments for libraries. We had some [truly] exciting conversations, but there were two things that we heard loud and clear in order to help shape some of our investments.

One was on the part of many different interested stakeholders, investors, and parties: that we’ve invested a lot in creating the digital world and it’s now time to try to identify more of a national platform and try to invest in that. IMLS has over the years made many great investments in lots of digitization efforts, but it’s now the time to identify the ones that are most effective and can be readily scalable so that we can begin to have much more regional and national connectivity.

The second thing is that our library staff are such dedicated individuals. They have a clear understanding that their role is shifting from information provider to the role of mentor, coach, learning navigator—particularly when you think about how much learning is online [and as] people become more and more interested in their own lifelong learning or self-motivated learning.

It was interesting that even though our convenings were focused on the national leadership grants, in terms of our program, we also heard a strong message about priorities for the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. We certainly want to continue to support the development of master’s degrees and graduate curriculum, but we also want to make sure that we’re supporting a workforce that is providing the kind of learning experiences that our communities expect and value.

We’re all learning institutions. I think we’re very, very similar, and the differences are not really very different at all.

I have seen that sometimes museums have more flexibility in terms of making something happen because they’re often nonprofit entities, and they don’t necessarily have a city council or something to go through. So museums are very good at taking prudent risk. They’re willing to try something and see how it works and make changes if it doesn’t work quite well. But in some cases, they’re a little more daring than our library colleagues. There may be many reasons, but I think it could be an environmental reason in terms of [how] they’re governed.

Libraries and museums more and more are joining forces because we’re part of a greater learning ecosystem. For instance, this work that we’re doing with BUILD Initiative, we have libraries and museums talking to their state early learning networks and finding out things about each other that they didn’t even realize.

Libraries and museums are very strong assets to make a difference in people’s lives. We’re very strong together, and our assets really complement each other. Funders are looking for that. So, it’s an opportunity to frame our role that way.

We do a lot of work with other federal agencies, non­profits, foundations, and they care about making sure that all the assets of the community are working together. That’s including schools, libraries, museums, nonprofits, and after-school programs. Building those kinds of networks is really important, and many foundations don’t want to invest unless they know that kind of collaboration is going on. The libraries and the museums can do that well together, either of them, depending on their communities, can play that role as the community connector, and that’s something that they’re learning from each other.

The phrase is collective impact. Collective impact a real focus—I found at least in Washington and nationally and internationally—of investors, funders. They want to know that if they’re investing in whatever particular interest area they may have, that the communities or the ecosystems that they’re working with are all working together to support this.

In terms of collective impact, in the field of education, libraries and museums have a huge role to play, and they have to be frankly quite aggressive in getting themselves out there and making it known to their community that they can play these roles. I’ve been in a number of sessions here in Washington where we have school folks and we have community college folks and after-school programs, and libraries and museums can be a key part and are already doing a lot of work in those areas. It’s important that libraries and museums understand that they can be the glue, if you will, that keeps a community together, and they can highlight this collective impact. They can come together to make a strong ecosystem in their ­community.

This is a great organization representing libraries and museums, and that’s the fabric of our community. I’m very pleased with what we’ve done. We have a number of dedicated staff here. We have great support from stakeholder groups like ALA and [the Urban Libraries Council] and [the Association of Research Libraries] and the litany of the alphabet soup and the library and museum world. I think we have been very successful in working positively with our stakeholders.

We have been an organization that is well known—and should be well known—for its peer-review process, which is excellent, and we have generally put out a call for good ideas and accepted all the applications we got over the transom, figured out what was best, and funded them. That is a very good job, but I think we have to move forward and try to be a little bit more directional or at least identify some key priorities in terms of our grant-making. Of course our largest program is the grants to states. That’s [a] great investment. We have some general guidelines that all those activities have to follow.

In terms of our competitive funds, the national leadership grants, Laura Bush 21st Century, we have to be very focused on outcomes and results to be able to show to the administration and Congress that the investments they’re making in these programs are valuable.

And although we have funded many great activities in the past, during my tenure, and I hope it will continue, we’ll be a bit more focused on various priorities so that we have investments that can show the outcome. In the long run, that will help insure the productivity, the existence of IMLS, and also make sure that all of our policymakers and funders understand that what we’re doing makes a difference.