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Report on Aurora 2007: helping early-career librarians

2007 marked the 10th Aurora Library Leadership Institute gathering, held at Thredbo from 15–20 February.

Facilitated by Becky Schreiber and John Shannon, Aurora provides an opportunity for early-career librarians to develop valuable leadership skills. The Institute’s stated mission is to ‘assist future leaders in the library and associated cultural and information industry to maximise their leadership skills and potential … through a combination of experiential learning, group and individual exercises, and by working with a strong team of senior and experienced Australian and New Zealand mentors’. It promises to be ‘a demanding, challenging and exciting experience’. The actual Aurora experience meets all these promises, and offers much more.

The five days of the Aurora gathering cover an intensive period of group and individual activities, presentations and talks from leaders in the library field, and opportunities for both formal and informal discussions. It mixes the abstract and theoretical with the extremely practical, so that participants leave with both a real understanding of the concepts of leadership, and some very concrete ideas on how to apply this new awareness.

The 32 Aurora participants work closely with eight mentors: senior members of the library and archives community who act as facilitators, role models, sounding-boards and advisors. The mentors provide feedback, and share their own experiences, challenges, successes, and (often most illuminatingly) failures, as managers and leaders. The opportunity to work closely with senior figures is one of the great benefits of the Aurora experience and is both instructive and inspiring.

Another benefit of Aurora is the opportunity for self-reflective practise outside the work environment. Aurora provides a rare space in which to consider questions about leadership, the profession, and oneself. Participants engage actively in conceptualising what a leader is, what sort of leader they want to be, and what influence they can bring to bear positively on their institution and the broader profession. These are ambitious aims, but Aurora encourages participants to think big! While these questions cannot be fully answered in five days, Aurora provides an ideal starting point. Participants leave with greater self-awareness, a clear personal vision, both for their own career and for the future of the profession, and a heightened ability to think strategically.

In addition to these skills, Aurora provides a valuable network of colleagues and friends on which to subsequently call for professional assistance. The diverse range of participants is one of Aurora’s strengths, with attendees drawn from across library sectors, and from geographically dispersed areas. The breadth and depth of combined experience creates a vast pool of knowledge.

Past participants have referred to the Aurora Leadership Institute as being stimulating, challenging, confronting, inspiring and life-changing. Personally, I am still processing the impact of Aurora, and how I will apply what I learned to my professional life. I am confident the experience will continue to influence me throughout my career. It has encouraged me to think broadly about the role of libraries and how they can best serve the end-user. And it has helped me to focus on how I personally can contribute to meeting the challenges and opportunities which face libraries. I left Thredbo with a stronger commitment to the profession and a renewed enthusiasm about the future of libraries.

Belinda Tiffen
Executive Support Division
National Library of Australia