The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has announced the appointment of Deputy Director for Library Services Cyndee Landrum as Acting Director, effective March 21, following the conclusion of former Director Crosby Kemper’s four-year term. Landrum will lead the agency until a new director is nominated by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

LJ last spoke with Landrum shortly after she stepped into the deputy director role in June 2019. In that capacity, she oversaw the agency’s largest program—Grants to States—and managed grant programs funding library leadership, workforce development, small libraries, and Tribal and Native Hawaiian libraries. Prior to her time at IMLS, Landrum served as CEO and director of Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library, IN, and held leadership positions at several other public libraries over the course of her career. We caught up with her again to hear her take on the past four and a half years, and what her new role will entail.

LJ: The world is a very different place since we last talked. How did the work you had planned at IMLS change? Were there any surprises for you about the work you saw libraries doing during the pandemic?

Cyndee Landrum: Because I was fairly new in my role before that sudden shift, I was just getting myself acclimated to IMLS and learning about the work. We were very adaptive and able to pivot, and part of that reflects the ability of our colleagues in the museum and library worlds. As you know from the variety of stories that you all covered during that time, libraries and museums were very quick to move their work online, to find ways to safely connect with their communities, to address significant gaps in terms of access to broadband, and other issues around digital inclusion. I don’t think it was necessarily surprising, because we know that libraries know how important they are in serving their communities, but I think the speed with which libraries were able to pivot, and their willingness to do whatever needed to be done—whether that was passing out COVID tests or moving to a different service model—really made me proud as a person in the cultural sector, and in particular, as a librarian.

What aspects of your work at IMLS were the most gratifying?

The work that we were able to do during the pandemic with our state library partners, as well as those individual libraries and tribal libraries that we were able to fund. And, at the same time, the things we’ve been able to learn, and the gaps in our own work that we’re able to think about to figure out how we can do things differently and better—and think about the diversity of the libraries that we serve, because during that period of time we had quite a few new applicants who had never applied to IMLS before. It gave us a good window into the opportunities that we can create in our grantmaking to serve a broader swath of the library and museum communities.

How will your responsibilities change with this new role?

I see this as an opportunity to continue to do the great work that we cultivated over the last four—almost five—years to keep at the forefront the essential nature of museums and libraries and continue to amplify that, both in the federal government, and also in communities, and elevate how important museums and libraries are to addressing community needs. We have always known it at IMLS, and we have always sought to make sure that others know it. I think the pandemic in particular has really been a source of fine-tuning that and amplifying it to a much larger audience.

I was Deputy Director for Library Services, so my primary constituency was libraries and the LIS ecosystem. My colleagues in museums have done some wonderful and amazing work over these past several years, and we want to continue that, particularly around developing a comprehensive museum survey, which has never been done before. Now that I will have the full scope of the portfolio of both museums and libraries, that’s the primary change for me. But I see that work is complementary to the work that I’ve done before in terms of making sure that we are amplifying both sectors, and making sure those sectors are both individually and collectively amplified, as they often work together and in sync with each other.

What other goals do you have for the agency?

We have the learning agenda, which we introduced recently. It situates additional areas that are important, which are the work around child reading and literacy from a research lens—which will potentially inform funding and other things in the field around the role of libraries. Then, internal to the agency, is our equity in grant making. Earlier I talked about the pandemic giving us a window of opportunity to think about the types of organizations that we fund, but also how we fund. That research is super important as we think about the future of funding at IMLS. The other thing, not necessarily off the beaten path of what we’ve done, but that will be very critical in thinking about the future, is our information literacy task force work that we will continue as we move forward.

I was excited to see the list of finalists for the 2024 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Will there be an official event this year?

It’s in the works—we are hopeful that a ceremony will take place. We have some great finalists, and I think they’re exemplars of exactly the conversation we just had about the types of work that libraries are doing to meet the unique needs of their communities and meet people where they are. We’re looking forward to celebrating the winners.