pWhether you're a new academic library director or a goal-minded manager, you can take concrete steps to gain and strengthen the leadership skills necessary for the job. That's the empowering message of this new collection which offers critical reflection to illuminate the path ahead. Featuring contributions from seasoned veterans sharing several careers' worth of lessons learned, this bookp ul liexplores key facets of beginning leadership such as surviving the first year, the art of asking, and becoming a supervisorli lideals with strategic planning, team-building, shared governance, forming and maintaining important relationships, community outreach, and other crucial skillsli lidiscusses safety, personnel-related legal issues, building a new library, managing change, and other potentially stressful situations andli liincludes a chapter on cultural diversity programming.li ul pThis work offers a starting point from which academic library directors and aspirants can learn about variou