Academic Libraries and Toxic Leadership

Alma C. Ortega is a tenured librarian at the University of San Diego’s Helen K. and James S. Copley Library in San Diego, California. She has more than 12 years’ experience in academic libraries. She is a reference librarian and bibliographer for the areas of history, Spanish and Italian literatures as well as Asian Studies. She also teaches course-integrated sessions, works extensively with graduate students, and researches collection management, archives place in libraries, and leadership styles in academic libraries. She earned two bachelor’s degrees in Peace and Conflict Studies and Spanish from the University of California at Berkeley (1996) and two master’s degrees in Library and Information Studies (2002) and Latin American Studies (2003) from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a PhD Candidate in Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego. She has been working in libraries since 1998.

• 1. What Is Leadership? What Is Toxic Leadership?2. How to Acknowledge Toxic Leadership’s Presence3. What to Do About Toxic Leadership?4. Regaining Control of the Library5. Healing for the Organization Free of Toxic Leaders6. Cases

"Alma C. Ortega (University of San Diego) highlights the underreported phenomenon of poor leadership in academic. ...libraries that can infect an entire organization and demoralize library staff. She is to be applauded for starting this conversation, and librarians will benefit from reading the experiences of others as a lens to identify toxicity in their own current or past libraries and to become emboldened to do more than endure it silently." --Theological Librarianship, Vol. 10, No. 1