More dynamic Leadership Library to debut

Since its creation in 2017, the Leadership Instruments Library (LIL) has been one of the foremost of the scholarly assets of JMU’s School of Strategic Leadership Studies.

An outgrowth of a collaboration between prior SSLS director Karen Ford and former graduate assistant Sam Nickels (‘16Ph.D.), the LIL consists of more than 100 research tools scholars all over the world can use to quantify and measure leadership as it relates to individuals and organizations.

At first, says Ford, “we set out to do this just for ourselves and the students.” She pronounces herself “thrilled” with the way the project has since taken wing. Had she known the LIL would be so enthusiastically received, Ford laughs, “we would have copyrighted and sold it.”

According to Education Librarian Brian Sullivan, JMU Libraries’ liaison with the SSLS, the LIL’s purpose from the outset has been to provide an easy, one-stop source for leadership instruments such as surveys, scales and questionnaires. Now, seven years into the LIL’s active service-life, more than 11,000 downloads have been logged.

In its original iteration, the LIL consisted of PDF documents residing on the JMU Scholarly Commons. However, PDFs can be cumbersome to download, change and update compared to newer types of digital content that have become standard since 2017. And so this past spring a new cadre of SSLS students prepared to take the baton handed off by Ford and Nickels. They embarked on a project – now almost complete – to thoroughly update the LIL. Overall project direction and management have been provided by Margaret Sloan, SSLS director since 2020, in consultation with Sullivan and other members of JMU Libraries’ faculty and staff.

The project team was seeking, says Sullivan, a “more nimble and dynamic” option, and especially one more amenable to updating as needed. His suggestion was to have the LIL pivot away from the existing PDF-intensive model to one that leverages JMU Libraries’ account with Pressbooks, a technology platform that enables authors to publish documents in an open-source format that’s easily accessible to a wider audience.

Liz Thompson (‘93), JMU Libraries’ Open Education Librarian, says Pressbooks promotes a more interactive readership. “It’s more appropriate … for the ways in which people relate to content today,” she says. Thompson is quick to add, however, that the conversion process has not simply been a matter of lifting content from the existing LIL and loading it into Pressbooks. “They’ve changed it up as they have transitioned to the new platform,” says Thompson. Existing instruments have been revised, clarified or – in some cases – deleted. New ones have been added. “It’s almost as if they’ve created an entirely new publication,” she says.

“What all of this does is allow the LIL to stay current,” sums up Sullivan. “As new leadership instruments come out, they can easily be inserted into the book.”

Readers are encouraged to assist in this process of making the LIL an ever-more-powerful resource by submitting new instruments, updating existing ones and supplying corrected information or information that fills existing gaps.

“We see it as a contribution by the SSLS to the broader leadership-scholarship community,” says Sloan. “The intent,” she says, “is that we’re constantly going to be updating this document to incorporate new leadership instruments that reflect the current scholarship.”

Sloan sees the process possibly evolving into an ongoing joint project between the SSLS and the International Leadership Association, a global network of leadership scholars. The SSLS has had initial discussions with the ILA about such a partnership.

“Since the LIL will be a dynamic document moving forward, what I foresee happening,” she says, “is that SSLS students are going to be continually involved in the monitoring of requests for changes and in the vetting of those requests.”

Against the backdrop of the SSLS’s observance this fall of its 15th anniversary, Sloan says she hopes the revision and re-deployment of the LIL will be viewed as a “signature contribution which is noteworthy and considered highly credible and reputable.”

“I’ve been really pleased,” she says, “that it has been such a collaborative initiative – one that has drawn on the skill-sets of so many people.”

“Nothing is static in this world,” Ford declares. She says she hopes that “LIL 2.0” will, like its predecessor, perform a valuable service for a time, and then make way for a still newer and better version.