july04b.indd


The
kind
of
job


you
could
only
have
in
Washington



If steering the course for the world’s largest 
museum library from an office on the National 
Mall sounds like something you aspire to, then 
being the director of the Smithsonian Institution 
Libraries (SIL) might be your job of a lifetime. 
After a distinguished career including positions 
at the Library of Congress, the Council on 
Library Resources, and the Research Libraries 
Group, Nancy E. Gwinn joined the Smithsonian 
in 1984 as assistant director for 
Collections Management, and has 
served as director since 1997. 

I asked Gwinn what originally 
attracted her to SIL and she re­
sponded, “I had been working 
at the Research Libraries Group 
(RLG) in California and I decided 
that if I was going to come back 
to Washington, I wanted to come 
back to the kind of job that you 
could only have in Washington. 
The Smithsonian itself, and the fact 
that it was a unique organization, 
fit my criteria of a job you could 
only have here. Once, during the 
interview process, I walked across 
the Mall and looked up at the U.S. Capitol and 
down at the Washington Monument. I said 
to myself, ‘You couldn’t be more Washington 
than this.’ It was really only after I took the job 
that I began to understand this institution in its 
political, bureaucratic, and fi nancial complexity. 
Let us say it was a slow courtship initially, but 
eventually, along the line somewhere, it turned 
into a marriage.” 

Beyond the castle walls 
When I asked Gwinn what people might be 
most surprised to learn about her position, she 

Nancy E. Gwinn, director of 
the Smithsonian Institution 
Libraries. 

replied that, “Most people don’t know there is a 
library here at the Smithsonian, if we’re talking 
about the general public, and it may even be 
true in certain parts of the library profession. 
The second surprise is that there is no library 
building, and the third one is our size, the fact 
that we have 1.5 million volumes—including 
40,000 rare books and manuscripts—that we 
have a $9.5 million dollar budget, and that we 

have 20 libraries that all report 
into central administration. Just 
the magnitude of the enterprise is 
a surprise to people.” 

All meetings, all the time? 
Gwinn chuckled when I asked 
whether a director’s job is really all 
meetings, all the time. “It was an 
interesting question for me, since 
I came up from the ranks myself. 
A lot of administration is dealing 
with people and that can happen 
in all kinds of ways, individually 
and in groups. Groups can be very 
effective, which means meetings. 
Another huge part of the job, 

which really has only become so prominent in 
my tenure, is fundraising. 

Starting in the mid ’90s there were 
changes in the White House and in Congress 
that made clear the Smithsonian was not 
going to be as well supported federally as 
we had been used to. If we were going 
to maintain current programs, much less 
grow, we were going to have to get into 
fundraising in a big way. In fact, the current 
Smithsonian secretary (which is the title of 
the top person, just like a cabinet secretary) 
has dictated that all directors should spend 

Danianne Mizzy is assistant head of the Engineering Library at the University of Pennsylvania. Have an idea for a “Job of a 
Lifetime” story? E-mail: danianne@seas.upenn.edu 

370 / C&RL News July/August 2004 

mailto:danianne@seas.upenn.edu


a minimum of 20 percent of their time on 
fundraising activities.” 

Two of Gwinn’s major accomplishments 
in this area were the creation of a national 
SIL Board to assist with fundraising and the 
creation of the Spencer Baird Society, for donor 
recognition and annual giving. 

Change isn’t easy 
On the topic of implementing change, Gwinn 
said, “I think wherever you are implementing 
change is not easy. In large institutions and 
bureaucracies, it’s probably even harder. The 
need for fundraising required a tremendous 
cultural shift here. My staff and the staff we 
serve still periodically ask me if we aren’t ‘off 
mission’ because we are doing events and 
trying to raise our image, visibility, and stature 
in order to attract outside funding. When we 
began to digitize and develop our Web site, 
although we raised funds for it, we still had to 
reallocate some internal resources. 

“With any new operation, some feel that 
it detracts from money that would otherwise 

exhibitions. Now we’re 15 years down the line 
and are constantly doing exhibitions that have 
been well received. We’re carrying ourselves 
within the American History Museum in terms 
of visitors. That was all new and we had to 
invent it as we went.” 

One of Gwinn’s current projects is piloting 
SIL’s $20 million capitol campaign. “This was 
a new thing that I needed to learn how to 
do, and I’ve relished the challenge. Initially, 
we thought we were going to be part of an 
institutional campaign that would be the 
normal five­year sort of thing. Then the new 
secretary came in and said that the institu­
tion wasn’t going to do an institution­wide 
campaign at all. Every unit was charged to 
do what it needed on its own, although there 
was some seed money given from central 
funds to help. 

“We pedaled back a bit to put the infrastruc­
ture in place that we needed if we were going 
to do this on our own. We won’t kick off the 
public phase until we’ve raised a good half 
of the funds or more. We’ve raised about 25 

be supporting whatever 
Director of museum library 

percent, so far. I’ve had 
they think the core to fight a lot of internal 
mission is. I’ve spent a 

Where: Smithsonian Institution, 
Washington, D.C. 

For more information, visit: www.sil. 
si.edu 

battles along the way 
lot of time talking to staff and it has been, let us 
about how the Internet say, a process again of 
and our electronic inventing and moving 
offerings are now part one step at a time.” 
of the core mission. 

“I remember the 
same thing happened in the ’80s when I fi rst 
came and began to enhance our preservation 
program. People were saying, ‘Oh this is adding 
to our workload, we can’t possibly do this. It’s 
taking books away from the stacks etc.’ After 
five or six years, it became a standard thing 
and now the question is why can’t we do more 
of it. You have to introduce these things, be 
consistent in your message, and continue to 
try to show the benefi ts. Over time, the change 
is embraced and becomes part of the general 
picture.” 

Inventing as she goes 
While still assistant director, Gwinn launched 
another important outreach effort, the SIL 
exhibition program. She recalled, “Starting one 
within a museum like the National Museum 
of American History, where there is a lot of 
competition for attention, was no small matter. 
It wasn’t like having a few cases in your library 
lobby or rare book room. We had no internal 
funds, so we had to start raising money for 

Tis a gift to come 
down where we ought to be 
Gwinn had a very interesting response when 
I asked for her advice to those aspiring to be 
directors one day. “I have to poke at your 
assumption that I had aspired to lead an 
institution some day. There are people who 
start out their careers saying that their goal 
is to be the director of a major research 
library. My main aspiration was to always be 
in challenging and interesting jobs. I moved 
from job to job with that idea, not necessarily 
thinking it was going to lead me anywhere in 
particular. 

“It is really quite amazing to me that at 
the Smithsonian, I found a place so constantly 
challenging and interesting that, rather than 
moving on after five years, which had been my 
past pattern, I ended up staying. I have really 
thrived on it because the job itself has given 
my career new dimensions. At this point, even 
in tough budget times, I can hardly imagine 
being anywhere else.” It sounds like it’s been 
a perfect match. 

C&RL News July/August 2004 / 371