By Dominic Agyei Dankwah
The 2026 Mortenson Center Associates Program has brought together a cohort of library professionals from academic, medical, legal, national, and research libraries across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. While their institutional settings and career stages varied widely, their profiles reveal a shared orientation: libraries are being repositioned as strategic actors in teaching, research, and knowledge systems shaped by data, technology, and changing user expectations.
Many of the fellows arrived with established leadership responsibilities and extensive professional experience. Some are already directing or managing academic libraries, leading service transformation, or coordinating national-level programmes. Others are at earlier stages of their careers, seeking to bridge the gap between academic preparation and the operational realities of library work. Across this spectrum, a common expectation emerged: to strengthen the ability of libraries to demonstrate impact, respond to users more effectively, and adapt to technological change.
The program theme, Poised for Impact: Data, User, Strategy-Driven Libraries, closely reflected these priorities. For many participants, data is no longer simply a reporting tool but a strategic resource for understanding services, communicating value, and guiding decision-making. Whether working in large research universities or specialised institutions, fellows express a shared interest in improving how libraries capture, interpret, and use data to shape services and institutional narratives. At the same time, the cohort consistently emphasise the importance of user-centered practice. Across contexts, fellows describe the challenge of aligning library services with evolving user behaviours, from students navigating digital learning environments to researchers working in increasingly complex scholarly ecosystems. This reinforces a shared expectation that libraries must move beyond traditional service models toward more responsive, participatory approaches.
Technology and artificial intelligence also featured prominently in fellows’ expectations. Many participants identify the need to better understand how AI, digital platforms, and emerging tools are reshaping information access, research support, and instructional services. However, there is a consistent emphasis that technology should be guided by user needs and institutional priorities, rather than adopted for its own sake. What stands out most clearly across the cohort is not difference, but convergence. Despite varying institutional capacities and regional contexts, fellows share remarkably similar professional concerns: how to remain relevant, how to demonstrate value, how to lead change, and how to support increasingly complex information environments.
The Mortenson experience has therefore become more than a professional development opportunity; it functions as a space where individual expectations are reflected, refined, and reimagined through global exchange. Fellows are not only learning new practices, but also situating their own institutional challenges within a broader international landscape of library transformation. Ultimately, the program highlights a growing reality. A reality that library professionals are entering a shared global moment in which leadership, data literacy, user understanding, and technological awareness are becoming essential competencies. Being poised for impact is not a future aspiration, it is an ongoing process already being shaped by the work of this diverse cohort.