Bea Hardy ’83 became the associate vice president for Goucher’s library and learning commons in Fall 2024. Previously, she was dean of libraries and instructional resources at Salisbury University.

By Molly Englund

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You used to be a professor; how did you transition to working in libraries?

I was a professor of history at Coastal Carolina University, and I burned out fairly quickly. So I went from that to being the #2 person at the national office of National History Day, which is like a science fair but for history.

My job there required working with a lot of libraries and historical societies and museums that sponsor the state and regional programs. I got used to working with archives in libraries, and so on. And of course I’ve done a lot of research, as well. The president of the Maryland Historical Society called me one day and asked me to apply for the library director job. I laughed at him. I was like, “I haven’t worked a day in my life in libraries, not even as a student worker.”

And he said, “Yes, that’s why I want you.”

Here’s the thing, if you go to a college library or public library, the librarians are all about helping you use the collections, right? That wasn’t the case necessarily at historical societies and archives 20 years ago. The attitude there was more, “get your grubby hands off our stuff.” But he wanted someone who would help people use the collections rather than hiding the collections. And they weren’t hidden for any evil reason; they wanted to preserve the collections. But if no one knows you have them and no one uses them, what’s the point of preserving the collection?

I ended up getting the job as library director, and I went to library school at the same time. I started to miss being in academia, though. When the opportunity came to be director of Special Collections at the College of William and Mary, I jumped at it. I eventually became interim dean of libraries there, and I really enjoyed the library-wide experience, not just focusing on special collections. I started looking for library dean jobs and ended up at Salisbury University. I was there for 12 years, and then I came here.

You made a number of changes at Salisbury that turned it into a highly ranked library. What did that involve?

We opened a new library building in 2016 that was a vast improvement on the previous library. But it also was a major change in staff and culture in the library, becoming more student oriented, helpful, meeting student needs, and not being busy shushing people or threatening them for having food. None of that. And like the Ath, which originally had Alice’s Café, our new library had a café in it.

We worked a lot with student groups. We did a lot of stuff for diversity-related months, to honor student heritage and local community. We did a lot of surveys to make sure we met students’ needs. We would lend out all sorts of equipment.

There was a major change in staff over the 12 years I was there, as well. And that helped; some of the people who had very old-fashioned attitudes retired, and that was helpful. We had other people who’d been there for a long time, who totally adapted and embraced the change; it just depended on the person.

Were you a history major at Goucher?

I double majored in history and historic preservation. I loved architecture and I loved history, so historic preservation seemed like a natural match. That was what drew me to Goucher, because at the time there were only three colleges in the country that had an undergraduate historic preservation major. And I realized in my senior year that I only needed to take one more history course to be a history major, too, so I did that.

What is special about a college library to you?

The partnerships with faculty are special. For a college library to succeed, it must partner with the faculty. We need to know what they’re teaching and how we can support them.

The other thing that makes the library special is the students. Students come to the building even if they don’t have a specific assignment requiring the library. It’s a third place to be rather than their dorm room or classroom. For some students, we become their second home on campus. Or in the case of commuter students, sometimes we’re their first home on campus. That is special. We get to know our regulars pretty well.

Does the college seem very different from your time here as a student?

The college was still single sex when I was a student, so it does seem different in that regard. I missed one or two reunions, but I’ve been to most of them, so every five years I would take the walking tour of campus and see what was new.

We have an entirely different library now.

Yes. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I went down to look at the history books to discover that no, the books that were there when I was a student are no longer there. We have newer books. Yay. So that was good.

What do you like about the library’s physical space?

It’s nice that we have comfortable seating around the library. When my mother and I came for my college tour, the librarian, Sally Jones, was near retirement. She took us on the tour, and there were these big cushions on the floor. She said, “The students like to sit there, so we figured we should give them something comfortable to sit on.” But she’s rolling her eyes at the craziness of students.

I like that she still gave in to it, even if she didn’t understand it.

It was a mystery to her; “OK, this is what they want.” But we have more comfortable furniture now, and you don’t have to sit on the floor.

How else do you want to improve the library as a space?

We want to work with facilities management to lessen noise. When there are events in the forum, the noise comes right into the main floor of the library, and that is the biggest complaint students have.

We also need more individual study spaces. There are so many people who take online classes or have online meetings. If you’re in the big space yakking away on your computer with the audio going, it’s distracting. We need individual spaces with doors that close. There’s also a need for privacy—students might need to have a conversation that they don’t want everyone to hear, whether it’s a job interview or talking to a counselor, but they don’t have anywhere else to do it.

How would you like to see the digital library evolve?

Digital is definitely a mixed blessing. For our distance programs, we need to have electronic resources that people can access from wherever. For people who are on campus, every study shows that students say they prefer print books to electronic, for research and scholarly reading and so on. But the reality is that usually it’s fairly last minute and they need something they can get from their dorm room. So digital is the way to go. The challenge for libraries is we license a lot of the digital materials. If we don’t pay the fee every year, it goes away, and in challenging budget times, that can be difficult. Whereas with books and print journals, once you have them, they’re yours.

A lot of people don’t realize libraries get charged a lot more for digital books than an individual buying a book would, because more than one person will be using it. And if a faculty member wants to assign it to a class, then it’s a challenge in terms of buying a license that allows multiple people to use it at the same time—you have to pay more for the unlimited use license. It can start eating up a book budget fairly quickly. But it’s still probably cheaper than having each person in a class buy the book.

Do faculty ever come to the library and say, I’m developing this course, what are some resources?

Ideally, they do. I am for the moment on the curriculum committee, so I see what new courses are being proposed and then I can reach out to faculty. We also have our instruction librarian, TaChalla Ferris, who does outreach to the faculty. With Special Collections, like with the Hallowed Ground Project, people do reach out to say, “How can we use Special Collections for this course?” That can lead to some pretty interesting and sustained research. It also tends to be more original research for the students, something unique compared to a standard research paper.

How do items get into the special collections and archives?

It depends on what they are. It is our college archive, so the college’s permanent records and history are supposed to be transferred automatically. For the rest, it primarily is by donation. Typically, that would be alums who donate materials. Sometimes there are other people, but usually it’s faculty, staff, or alums. Or their families will contact us after the person passes away and offer materials.

What else should people know about the library?

There’s so much more information available than when I was an undergraduate. But there’s also so much more bad information available. People need help learning to wade through and figure out what is the good information and how to find it.

We’re trying to build up instruction more; we’re working on outreach to faculty. We’re trying to work with student government; they approached us about a partnership to do different things. They recently had a survey about having a book club for students that would be centered in the library. And we will be doing surveys of students to see what they want and need from the library.

Is there a book you’ve read recently that stayed with you?

I’ve joined two book clubs since I moved to Towson, so that’s keeping me busy. For one of my book clubs, we just read Take My Hand, which is about a case involving sterilization of poor people, largely Black people. This was a novel, but it was based on a real court case that took place in the Deep South in the early 1970s. That one will stay with me for some time.

You’re also your class note representative for Goucher Magazine. Why do you do it?

I was asked to do it, and I always enjoyed reading the notes. I used to read the notes for all the classes, because I like knowing about people. One of the weird things I found with reunions—my class was fairly small, 200 people. The first several reunions I came to, I knew maybe one person. It was like, “OK, this was a small class. How do I not know these people?” But the same group tends to come to reunion, so I’ve become friends with them over the years and are now Facebook friends with them. I’m always happy to hear about people and learn about people.