Two weeks into his tenure as CRL President, Jacob Nadal sat down with Jen Jenkins, Head of Membership Engagement and Communications, to chat about his professional trajectory, what's unique about CRL and why he's excited to lead it at this moment in its history, and priorities for his first year. 

Jen: As a 10-year-old, you likely weren’t answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “I want to be deeply embedded in the world of research libraries.” What was your trajectory into this world?  

Jake: Through college, I was most consistently focused on music and playing in ensembles, studying music history, writing music. In many ways, it was thanks to good advisors that I ended up being in a position where a career in libraries became possible. As I was finishing up my BA, working on my senior thesis about an American composer named Carl Ruggles, I had to request a lot of material through interlibrary loan. I remember the day that a librarian brought me back to their office and I looked around and thought: “This is a possible career.” My advisor, Geoffrey Block, had been encouraging me to pursue music scholarship but had also responsibly acknowledged that this was a narrow career path. Indiana University was a great choice for me for grad school both because of the great work that people were doing on American music there, but also as a place that had a really fine library school. And one thing led to another. 

In what ways had you engaged with CRL and its resources prior to coming on board as its president? What attracted you to this position?  

For me, CRL has always been an important part of the library landscape. I've attended any number of CRL convenings over the years and have been a regular at the Print Archive Network. Of course, I've also worked at universities where international collections and area studies were a focal point, so I also got to know CRL as an anchor institution for that work through subject matter specialists.  

I think what really attracted me to the position initially was that I had had a chance to get to know Greg Eow [CRL President, 2019-2024] at the Kuopio Conference, where he was talking about what he was engaged in, how he was getting CRL ready to be a great launchpad for the next arc of its activities. Everything he was working on — trying to be a really engaged partner, trying to get the right governance in place, developing the staff — just sounded very exciting. So when the position came up, and as I talked to people about the potential for CRL to be not just a useful collection of materials but also a real facilitator of dialogue about what we want the information landscape to be, I just couldn't have been more excited. 

What will you bring to the role of CRL President that is new? 

In the last couple of years, CRL has gone through what strikes me as a very brave period of organizational rebuilding — the kind of initiative that a lot of people talk about, but not many actually carry out. So: Kudos to everyone for seeing that through! It also means that CRL and the President have had to be somewhat inward-focused these last few years. It's clear to me that I need to be literally on the road and, so to speak, cognitively on the road as well. 

I have already been meeting with our committees and member library directors to get oriented and identify where CRL can act fast. This is an important moment to ensure that CRL has a dialogue with its members, across the diversity of that membership, to understand what a day in their life looks like and what we can do to improve that.  

We had a great conversation recently at a staff get-together, about how each CRL member has things happening on their local campus that they, and only they, can respond to, things that particular community needs to focus on in that moment: What's being taught in their courses, what kind of research is happening, etc. The question for us then is: To what extent can CRL take some something off their plate that frees up their time and attention to be fully attuned to and invested in their local community?  

What is unique about CRL in the research library landscape? Outside of CRL staff, who should care about CRL and why?  

CRL brings together the reliability of a collecting institution with the agility of a being an independent not-for-profit corporation. There are valuable forums in the profession where we gather to exchange ideas and set our course, but in most of those cases, we then return to our institutions and try to figure out how to take action based on that, and sometimes how to take action together, which is yet another step. CRL is a shortcut. We’re uniquely positioned to bring the community into conversation in the place where we can bring that conversation to action. Our ability to move quickly from insight to action is a big strategic advantage. I hope that our members start to feel that CRL is an incredibly useful tool in cutting out some of the waiting — the bureaucracy's already been tackled, the bylaws are written, the staff and capabilities are already in place — so CRL is a place that, once it gets the charge, can move on it. To me, that is a really important factor.  

The other piece that I hope members start to see in CRL is that we can be at the table in a different way than their institutions can, and we afford our community an additional set of levers and pathways to pursue our collective goals. There are conversations that CRL can broker, relationships that we can build uniquely and on behalf of our membership. I think that will ultimately give libraries, archives, and the work we do some mind share in venues where it needs to be present. 

I had a position in government that I felt deeply committed to, a mission and role I really believe in, and I would not have taken this chair if I didn't see potential for a group like CRL to be positively engaged as a valuable civil society player that can contribute across the spectrum of governmental and non-governmental actors. I think there is a real space that CRL can fill to help its members see their needs and concerns addressed.  

You’ve been in the role for two weeks now – first impressions? What are you most excited about at this early juncture?  

I wrote to some of our board members that what's impressed me the most is just how much the CRL staff is ready to go. I've stepped into leadership positions a number of times over the course of my career. There's always work to do and some of it's complicated and some of it's challenging and, for some of it, I need to remind myself that I always tell people patience is my real management virtue. But like nowhere else I’ve been before, the staff here has shown me how excited they are to work on and really discover what comes next. That's really inspiring. The culture of CRL, even as I interviewed for the position and have gotten oriented here, is just so positive and so encouraging. Coupled with that, I think the strategic environment in which we're going to do things is really rich: This is a moment that calls for a lot of open and intelligent discussion about how our large-scale collaborations around shared preservation responsibilities and shared access goals need to develop.  

I said this is a rich strategic landscape, so it’s probably worth saying that doesn’t mean it’s a simple or easy strategic environment. I'm coming from a very complicated world in federal government into a different very complicated terrain in higher education. I won't pretend to have mastered this just yet, but I think part of the job of president is to come to terms with it, so I can help everyone reckon with it, and make sure that CRL is delivering something useful in it. When I think about my work in government, one of the most rewarding things for me was to come to terms with those complex systems. Now, I recognize there’s a wisecrack to me made about some guy moving from DC to Chicago and saying, “what I really care about is good governance,” but on the level, figuring out the bedrock of law and policy, reflecting back what I’d learned to my colleagues, and asking if we were happy with it or if we could find a better way? That was a deeply rewarding process during my time in government. I learned a great deal about why governance matters and what makes it work. I’m looking forward to bringing that to CRL. 

Which priorities have you set for your first year as CRL president? What would you like to have accomplished by this time next year?  

A lot of work has already been done on reaffirming CRL’s commitments to global collecting. I've been read in on much of that work and on what comes next. I'm so excited to get that put into place to have a solid governance structure into which we can start directing resources and effort. Beyond the one-year mark, my motto is that CRL has a record of success in providing access to global information, and I would like us to take the next step towards promoting global access to information. I think there are valuable contributions our member area studies librarians can make, and I’d love to help open some doors for that. 

Alongside that, creating this great portfolio of resources to which CRL can provide access — whether through the collections we acquire, the licensing negotiations we undertake through NERL, or through partnerships to sustain the collective collection — is crucially important. However, building a great reservoir of resources falls flat unless we really understand discovery and delivery. We need to know how students and faculty and member librarians are finding and accessing the resources we provide. For me, that is probably the largest personal area for investment. Year one is going to be focused on making sure I really understand that discovery landscape and service delivery and have a plan, a strategy for protecting what's important, and developing in the areas where we need to improve. 

Something I need to be focused on with the CRL membership as its president is making sure that the value proposition is abundantly clear. We need to ensure that when a member makes that contribution, they see a real and meaningful return on their investment, a return that matters to them in the present. Hand in hand with that, if there are matters of concern among the members, I need to come to terms with those and understand them. I’m looking forward to getting on the road to start building that understanding.