Amanda Walch is currently working at the University of Jamestown as the Director of Libraries and an Assistant Professor. She graduated from SLIS in 2018, and had her first job out of library school at the Library of Congress as a member of the first cohort of their Librarians-in-Residence program, describing it both as a “pinch me” situation and as a program that made them “guinea pigs in every sense of the word.” She credits her time at SLIS for helping her get this position, as she got into the program due to her experience as a cataloging assistant for the University of Iowa’s School of Music.
Though she enjoyed those ten months, she knew by the close of the program that academic libraries were where she belonged, longing to work in a small academic library where she could “wear many hats,” she got a position at her alma mater Luther College as a sabbatical replacement, near the end of which had COVID hit. During COVID, she got a reference and instruction librarian position at Jamestown, and soon after was promoted to Director of Libraries at the recommendation of the previous, retiring, director. When asked how SLIS prepared her for this role, she said:
“The connections and foundation of people who are invested in your success as a student is a foundation I still draw on. Things like the librarians in the UI system, LISSO, our professors: it was the people, the connections, and the role models, that let me believe I could become a library director ten years before I ever thought I would.”
Her favorite part of her current position is that, in spite of being the director, she still gets to wear many hats! She regularly gets to interact with students, do collection development and learn more about archives and archival sustainability. Right now she is teaching an honors seminar on the value of reading, after completing a campus-wide reading challenge against another local college that she organized alongside Hannah Beebe (another SLIS alum). The success of this challenge at getting students involved in recreational reading (and the University of Jamestown’s ultimate victory over their rival) has motivated her and Hannah to continue their work on recreational reading initiatives and academic libraries, including the pair giving a round table talk at ACRL this past year!
Her advice to SLIS students is two-fold: take a wide range of classes, and join your professional library organizations! “There will be stuff beyond what you think you’re interested in that you’ll be interested in… joining, especially your local, library associations is how you build community… you should talk to every librarian you can! My favorite thing about librarians is how much they love being librarians. I've never had a librarian who didn’t want to tell me about their library.”