MOHAVE COUNTY – Mohave Community College’s Kingman campus librarian, Erin Roper, has been accepted into the American Library Association Emerging Leaders program for 2020.
The program is for librarians who have no more than five years of experience in the field. The goal for Roper is to work for six months on a project that she can later present at a conference.
“It’s a great opportunity to work with other people and learn about library advocacy on the national level because there’s a myth that libraries are going extinct or that they are not going to exist in a couple of years,” she said. “I am confident that libraries will exist but that they will change.”
Roper will attend an ALA midwinter meeting and meet the other participants, work online with a small group of other participants on an issue facing libraries or librarianship, and then present the findings at the ALA annual conference.
She will also expand her knowledge of leadership skills and learn what other libraries across the country are doing, and bring ideas back to Mohave County. She decided to apply for the ALA Emerging Leaders program because she wanted the voice of rural libraries to be heard on the national level.
In order for Roper to attend the conference she had to go through a competitive application process to be selected as one of the 50 participants. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Junior and Community College Libraries Section, and the ACRL Instruction Section are paying for her to participate in the national program. Mohave Community College is currently enrolling students for the spring semester, which begins on January 21. Apply for free online at www.Mohave.edu, or call 1-866-MOHAVECC .
Shown above, Erin Roper, Mohave Community College Librarian at the Neal Campus-Kingman.
