Librarian Luminaries- Isaac Gilman

Executive Director, Orbis Cascade Alliance

Column Editor: Caroline Goldsmith (Associate Director, The Charleston Hub)

Academic librarians and library staff are a bridge between the vast world of knowledge and the needs of students, faculty, and researchers. “Librarian Luminaries” is a new column which will feature a different librarian each month who has had a recent notable achievement, implemented a new idea or approach in their library, who is a trail blazer, or who is an overall exemplary model of service, scholarship and innovation.

We’re happy to share this interview with Isaac Gilman, Executive Director of Orbis Cascade Alliance and formerly Dean of University Libraries at Pacific University, who was featured for our March 2025 Librarian Luminaries column!

ATG: Hi, Isaac! Can you share a little bit with us about your background and education?

IG: I come from an education and library background; my mother started out as a children’s librarian and my father as an elementary/middle school teacher, so my life has been filled with books and reading from a very early age — which helped shape my education journey through high school and beyond. The latter half of my father’s career was focused on restorative justice work, both in community and juvenile justice settings, and I can see the influences of my parents’ work both in my choice to pursue librarianship and in my interests in disrupting systemic issues within our profession.

ATG: We noticed that you first earned a BA in English, then obtained your MLIS, and eventually a PhD in Education and Leadership. Did you have a career first using your undergraduate degree? What made you decide to go to library school or drew you towards librarianship?

IG: My undergraduate degree focused on literature and filmmaking, and I didn’t have a clear path to a related job after graduation, so I worked briefly for a juvenile court, working alongside adjudicated youth on community service projects, followed by a stint as a high school security aide. During that time, I applied to library school (finally giving in to familial patterns), because it seemed like it would lead to a job that I could enjoy. So, yes, I fit the stereotype of “I like books, and I like research, so why not librarianship?”

ATG: For 17 years, you were at Pacific University working in many different capacities — you taught both undergraduate and graduate courses, and were instrumental in creating the Pacific University Press. You served as library director and then, in 2018, you were promoted to Dean of Libraries. Can you tell us more about the evolution of your role over the years?

IG: I was fortunate to be hired at Pacific shortly after completing my MLIS; I had no prior library experience, and I’m grateful they were willing to take a chance on hiring someone with a degree into an entry-level position. Initially, I worked in access services — and, being new to the work, I asked lots of questions and volunteered to do things that likely “weren’t my place” to be asking or doing. So within the first year or two, I was dabbling in subject cataloging for theses/dissertations, starting to contribute to outreach sessions, and sending my director memos about how we could do things differently. From there, I moved into a faculty position supporting our graduate health programs, which led to my interest in creating an institutional repository both to help preserve student and faculty work and to create open access venues for sharing it more broadly. This evolved into my role leading our scholarly communication program, which included publishing student and faculty journals, as well as university-wide advocacy for open access and open educational resources. The culmination of this work was establishing a digital-first university press, which I was able to focus on during a sabbatical that took me to Australia to visit two library-based presses. Unbeknownst to me, the requirements of my work in scholarly communication and publishing were preparing me for a shift into library leadership — for example, the need to educate stakeholders, develop a case for support, collaborate across institutional structures, and demonstrate impact. When my director announced her retirement, I was appointed interim director and, eventually, made permanent director by the Provost. The shift from “director” to “dean” came two years later, as a result of my advocacy for the library’s significant academic role — which was buoyed by a successful effort to move peer tutoring services into the library organization.

ATG: This was shortly before emerging technologies like AI — at that time, what growing trends were you seeing in digital scholarship and data management, and how were they impacting your library?

IG: As you might expect, the impact of these areas for Pacific was not as significant as at larger research institutions. However, in some ways, the smaller scale made it more difficult to identify meaningful ways that the library could support faculty. We had just enough research and publishing activity that some faculty were dealing with funder data management and open access requirements, but not enough activity that would allow us to scale and sustain support services (e.g., for data management plans or for managing transformative agreements). This was compounded by what was — and continues to be — a trend in scholarly communication: a proliferation of approaches, platforms, and best practices that vary by discipline, funder, publisher, or project. With limited staffing and funding, the overarching challenge became: in the face of a continually evolving ecosystem, where do we invest (attention and money) for maximum impact, both for our own faculty and students and for the system at large?

ATG: What’s a major challenge you have faced in your role in academic librarianship and how did you overcome it?

IG: The most significant challenge I’ve had as a library leader was ongoing: consistent reductions in the library’s budget. If measured against successful advocacy for budget increases, then it’s a challenge I never overcame — but if I consider the extent to which I was able to position the library to weather future budget challenges; to preserve core services; and to prioritize people, then my assessment is different. Core to this was a strategy of reinforcing the library as an indispensable center of academic support; this began with my predecessor, who advocated for a new educational technology unit within the library. I extended this by bringing tutoring services into the library, and ensuring that personnel in both units were integrated into our structures. While this heightened the library’s profile within the administration and university, some cuts to our budget were still required on a regular basis, especially in collections. In order to prioritize resources specifically requested by faculty and students — whether books, journal articles, or required course readings — I collaborated with our library staff to transition our spending to more patron-driven models that required less upfront investment, as well as to find some limited sources of new collections funding in the university budget. Within all of this, I was adamant that while library resources could be fungible, our people were not. Although I did eliminate some open positions, I managed the budget so that I never had to eliminate a position with a person in it — and even in the midst of budget reductions, I found ways to increase salaries for some of our lower-paid staff and faculty to better recognize their contributions. While I never realized the level of funding I was advocating for, I was successful in maintaining support for the library within the university and in ensuring that library faculty and staff were engaged in developing solutions to our budget challenges and felt confident in my advocacy.

ATG: In 2023, you became Executive Director of the Orbis Cascade Alliance and stepped down from your role as Dean. What do you view as your most notable achievement during your time at Pacific University?

IG: The achievement I am most proud of is something that is not necessarily visible but that I hope laid the foundation for long-term positive change: over the course of my time at Pacific, I made a consistent effort to improve the experience of library staff. The ways in which the hierarchies of higher education are inherited and adapted within academic libraries — and mingled with librarianship’s own distinctive culture — can contribute to an environment in which library workers who are not in faculty positions or not titled as ‘librarians’ can experience their voices as less important (e.g., in the ways decisions are made or in the ways they are compensated). My solutions to try and address this were not perfect, but I believe I made progress in creating a better work environment by restructuring positions, compensation, and the ways in which we worked together in the library.

ATG: What are some key strategies you have initially focused on as Executive Director of the Orbis Cascade Alliance?

IG: As a library dean, I was necessarily attentive to the overall priorities of the university, and made it a point to ensure the library was aligned with them — and when possible, helping to shape their direction. As I’ve stepped into the Executive Director role, I’ve translated that approach to the Alliance. Conceptually, that means that I’ve been thinking about us not only as a library consortium, but as a higher education consortium that is part of advancing individual members’ institutional goals and the collective goals of higher education in the region. One example of what that looks like in practice is that I’ve worked with the National Student Clearinghouse to define a custom research project for the Alliance that provides an annual report on academic program enrollment and student transfer patterns across our members. Having that type of data can allow us to identify areas of potential common benefit (e.g., shared collections or services for high-enrolled programs), even across different types of institutions, and also enables me to speak more effectively about how we are serving a shared community of students. As our individual members, and the Alliance, continue to advocate for the value of libraries within our institutions and higher education, I believe stepping back and considering that broader context will make our strategies better-informed and our arguments more persuasive.

ATG: With Pacific University being a member of the Alliance, this made you a perfect fit for your current role. How do you feel you can further impact your alma mater, along with the other academic libraries in the Pacific Northwest, using your current position?

IG: “Perfect” might be a stretch, but it certainly gave me an appreciation for how the work of the Alliance extends the capacity of the work done within an individual library. Part of the way that happens is by the Alliance providing sustaining structures for library collaboration. Within a single library, capacity is often stretched so thin trying to manage the day-today that, even though external collaborations are beneficial to us and the people we serve, there isn’t the bandwidth to create and sustain the structures needed for them to be effective. And that is where the Alliance is particularly strong. For example, our physical resource sharing program (Summit) is directed by an Alliance program manager who provides structure and guidance, centralized services, and community-building — all of which would be too much for individual libraries to handle, but which serves as the critical connective tissue to keep that program running smoothly. I think my firsthand experience of that particular Alliance benefit — as a library leader trying to find ways to do more with increasingly less — motivates me to find new ways for the consortium to play that role for our members: to empower them to do more together than they might be able to coordinate on their own, and to facilitate and sustain new connections between themselves and other regional partners. I see myself as an individual, and the Alliance as an organization, as extending the ideation, planning, and management capacity of our members — and that’s where I see the potential for me to have a continued impact for Pacific and all of our libraries.

ATG: Can you tell us what Librarianship Elevated means to you?

IG: It has dual meanings — one externally focused and one internally focused. If access to information is a human right necessary for flourishing, then librarianship should be appropriately acknowledged and elevated for its role in preserving and promoting the exercise of that right. But in order to continue to be effective in that role, we need to be able to engage constructively with the world outside of librarianship — whether that is in higher education, public policy, government, philanthropy, etc. And to do that, we need to elevate our own knowledge, practice, and ability to advocate for our role and value in those spaces.

ATG: Thank you, Isaac, for this fascinating interview and for taking the time to talk with us about the work that you’re doing. We really appreciate it!

If you would like to nominate a librarian or library staff to be featured in this column, please reach out to us at info@charlestonhub.com.