Academic libraries do not recognize all leadership equally. Two unit directors may start at the same organizational level, yet one is repeatedly invited to chair committees, lead strategic initiatives, and represent the library across campus, while the other is expected to manage staff tensions, handle follow-up, solve operational problems, and keep the unit functioning behind the scenes. Both are leading. Both are contributing. But only one is being positioned to advance.
That is not simply a difference in style or workload. It is a difference in how institutions assign value.
Academic librarianship has long depended on labor that is relational, emotional, and sustaining. Lisa Sloniowski argues that academic library work includes gendered affective labor tied to care, support, and emotional management, even as that labor is often undervalued in comparison with more visible or prestigious work. She also shows that librarians are expected to shape and manage the emotional experiences of others while working in systems that do not fully recognize that labor as leadership.
This matters because institutions tend to reward what they can easily see. Committee leadership, strategic visibility, and public-facing assignments are legible as leadership. The labor of mentoring staff, managing conflict, carrying emotional strain, maintaining continuity, and keeping a team steady is often treated as routine, even when it is essential to the health of the organization.
Rachel Ivy Clarke, Katerina Lynn Stanton, Alexandra Grimm, and Bo Zhang make a similar point in their study of academic library value. They argue that traditional assessment frameworks privilege outputs and outcomes while overlooking the labor that makes collections and services usable in the first place. Their findings show that academic library work is broad, specialized, and frequently hidden from stakeholders, particularly when it involves background coordination, emotional labor, or work done after hours.
This becomes a leadership problem when unequal recognition shapes unequal opportunity.
When one director is consistently assigned the work that builds visibility and another is consistently assigned the work that preserves stability, the institution creates two distinct pathways within the same rank. One pathway leads toward advancement. The other leads toward being indispensable in place.
That pattern is not neutral. Gendered, racialized, and other identity-based assumptions often shape who is seen as strategic, who is described as “good with people,” who is expected to carry care work, and who is granted broader authority. Sloniowski’s analysis is especially useful here because it shows how emotional and affective labor in librarianship has been historically feminized and devalued, even while remaining central to academic life.
The result is not just inequity. It is career containment.
A director doing invisible labor may be praised as dependable, collaborative, and essential, yet still be denied the assignments that signal promotability. Over time, that person may become known for holding things together rather than for leading change, even though both forms of work require judgment, skill, and institutional knowledge. Meanwhile, the director with the more visible portfolio gains the examples, language, and credentials that translate more readily into advancement.
Clarke and her coauthors help explain why this pattern persists. They note that invisible work often includes intellectual, affective, and articulation labor: the coordinating, translating, and problem-solving work that keeps systems on track but disappears when done well. In fact, the more effective the work, the less visible it can become. That insight applies directly to academic library leadership. The more successfully a director prevents dysfunction, the easier it becomes for others to overlook the labor altogether.
So what can libraries do?
1. Audit who gets visible opportunities
Look closely at who chairs influential committees, who represents the library across campus, who is invited into strategic conversations, and who is repeatedly selected for high-profile work. If the same kinds of people are consistently receiving the most visible opportunities, the institution is not simply recognizing talent. It is reproducing advantage.
2. Make invisible labor visible
Mentoring, conflict management, staff support, operational continuity, emotional steadiness, and follow-through should be named explicitly in annual reviews, leadership assessments, and workload discussions. Work that remains invisible in documentation is unlikely to count in advancement.
3. Broaden the definition of leadership
Sloniowski makes clear that affective labor is labor. It requires skill, effort, and sustained attention. Libraries should stop treating care-centered and relational work as secondary to strategic leadership and begin recognizing it as leadership.
4. Create equitable access to promotable work
If advancement depends on visible leadership, then visible leadership opportunities must be distributed intentionally. Directors should have fair access to committee chairing, cross-campus initiatives, public presentations, and strategic project work. Otherwise, promotion pathways will continue to reward access more than contribution.
5. Examine identity-based assumptions
Any serious effort to address invisible labor must ask whether that labor is being distributed along gendered, racialized, or other identity-based lines. Clarke and her coauthors note that invisible labor can also include “racial tasks,” additional burdens placed on workers of color that often go unnamed and unrewarded. A healthier workplace does not wait for inequity to become undeniable. It pays attention to patterns early.
Summary
Academic libraries often speak in the language of collegiality, shared governance, and support. Those values matter. But they ring hollow when one director is groomed through visibility while another is relied upon for the labor no one names but everyone depends on.
The goal is not to make every leadership path identical. It is to ensure that invisible labor is not extracted from some leaders while visible opportunity is reserved for others. When one director moves up and another remains behind holding the unit together, the real question is not only who advanced. It is whose labor made that advancement possible, and why the institution refused to recognize it.
Further Reading
For readers interested in exploring these issues more deeply, two articles are especially helpful. Lisa Sloniowski’s “Affective Labor, Resistance, and the Academic Librarian” offers a feminist analysis of academic librarianship as gendered affective labor and helps explain why care-centered, emotionally demanding, and sustaining work is so often undervalued in academic settings.
Rachel Ivy Clarke, Katerina Lynn Stanton, Alexandra Grimm, and Bo Zhang’s “Invisible Labor, Invisible Value: Unpacking Traditional Assessment of Academic Library Value” examines how academic library value is typically measured and shows how those frameworks often obscure the labor required to make library services and collections usable. Their work is especially useful for understanding how invisible labor disappears in assessment, evaluation, and institutional narratives about value.
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