Alan Lawless, director of the Stratton Taylor Library at Rogers State University, was the only university library director in Oklahoma and one of only 94 librarians from across the U.S. to attend and graduate from a leadership institute for academic and research librarians at Harvard University.
This summer, Lawless graduated from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass.
The librarians who participated in the institute represented leading academic and research libraries from 33 states and Canada. The focus of the institute was improving the leadership and management of academic and research libraries.
Among the distinguished faculty at the institute was Robert Kegan, educational chair of the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education at Harvard University and author of the books “Evolving Self, Changing Leadership” and “How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work.”
Lawless has served as library director at RSU since 1983. Previously, he was the library director at Carl Albert State College in Poteau. He received a master of library science and bachelor of art’s degrees from the University of Oklahoma. He served on the board of the Will Rogers Library in Claremore for 15 years.
Recently, he was instrumental in the selection of the Stratton Taylor Library as the 20th Selective Federal Depository in Oklahoma and the only selective depository in Rogers County.
He presently is working on implementing a new integrated system for the Stratton Taylor Library that will feature a more powerful search engine; one-stop interface for catalogs, scholarly databases, interlibrary loan requests and virtual reference; and more information about library features. The new system is scheduled to be launched in the spring of 2007.
The state-of-the-art Stratton Taylor Library at RSU opened in 2004 and provides three stories and 30,000 square feet of collections and research space for RSU students, faculty and the community.