Meet New East Lansing Public Library Director Kevin King

Kevin King has taken over as East Lansing Public Library (ELPL) director, bringing decades of experience in libraries and a lifelong passion for learning with him. 

On his last day at Kalamazoo Public Library, ELi talked with King about his experience, what inspired him to become a librarian and his goals as ELPL’s director.

King will look to set library staff up for success.

When asked what makes a good library director, King said good leaders should help people get into a position to succeed. 

“You need to make sure they have the resources they need to succeed and make sure they have what they need to push forward,” King said. 

Staying connected to the community is another characteristic of a good library director, King said. 

“Going to events in the community to say ‘I’m here to represent the library because we feel what you’re doing is important so, in turn, you can consider what we’re doing is important,’’ he said. “I think fostering those connections is an important role of the director.”

King believes his desire for those around him to succeed, trust building skills, work ethic and passion will make his tenure in East Lansing a success.

“I think what’s going to make me a good director is that I am open to trustful conflict,” King said. “Respectful, restful conflict is going to make the library grow. And that’s not an easy thing, but it’s something I want to make sure that we can work on early on. That we can all trust each other.” 

King discussed the feedback he has received from staff members who he has helped obtain resources to succeed. 

“I got a nice email today from a library assistant who said: ‘Thanks for pushing me to be the leader I am now, because I never would have been without you supporting me and pushing me,’ and that’s where I’m proud,” King said. “That response makes me happy because that’s what I do, I want to help people succeed.” 

King has loved being in the library for as long as he can remember. As a teenager, he used to hang out at his local public library and enjoyed the safety that it provided him.

“It was a place that I just really, really enjoyed going to,” King said. “I enjoyed sitting in the stacks and just going through books and trying to find something to read.” 

He attended Michigan State University (MSU) with the intention of majoring in theater, but graduated with a degree in comparative language, not sure of the direction in which this degree would take him.

“I worked at a summer camp all throughout my college years and ended up being the director there,” King said. “I always enjoyed working with young people, but I didn’t think I wanted to be a teacher at all.”

As a student at MSU, King would commute to classes and often parked in the ELPL parking lot. He spent many hours studying there, and ultimately applied for a position as a third-year undergraduate student. He didn’t get the job, but has found his way back to East Lansing. 30 years later he takes over as library director. 

The summer before his senior year at MSU, King did an internship at his childhood library. This solidified the idea that he wanted to be a librarian.

King earned a master’s degree in Library and Information Sciences at Wayne State University and got his first library job in southern Indiana across the border from Louisville, Kentucky. 

“My wife was going to graduate school in Louisville, Kentucky, so I started working in a small town called Clarksville,” King said. “I was in a branch library and I worked there for almost two years.”

King then moved to Kalamazoo Public Library (KPL), where he proceeded to work for 25 years. He began his career at KPL as a teen librarian and held that position for eight years. 

“During that time, my team and I kind of redefined and reimagined how to serve teens at the library,” King said. “We ended up doing a lot of great programs, many author visits with really famous authors for the teenagers, and we just became really well-known and kind of a model for other programs in the country.”

Through his work as teen librarian and previous experience working at a summer camp, King found his passion for helping teens.

“My passion and what I really wanted to do is make sure people get connected to the resources they need to succeed,” King said. “As a teen librarian, working with teenagers, I was really passionate about making sure that teens have what they need. I firmly believe that if teens are coming to the library, we should honor that. They can go anywhere else, but they’re coming to the library.”

This mindset of helping others succeed has been at the forefront of the work King has done in all of his positions at KPL.

“I had a staff member who just never trusted me, and it made me sad,” King said. “I was like, I don’t want you to fail, I don’t benefit from your failure. I just want to make sure people know I’m there to help them win, I’m there to listen.” 

At KPL, he became a branch manager and then a department head, managing pretty much every part of the library from circulation, information and technology, audiovisual and more.

King has raised his two daughters in the Kalamazoo School District. His daughters have grown up “never in want of books,” and have had many family dinners with famous authors, such as John Green. 

When asked about why he has remained working in libraries for so long, King said it’s the opportunity to innovate and the people. 

“I’ve been given the opportunity to really kind of change up the ways libraries operate,” King said. “If I worked in an organization that didn’t appreciate innovation, I don’t think I would’ve been able to stay. That’s something I really value. And I really value the chance to work with people who have such a passion for serving the library. A lot of us who work for the public could’ve gone on and worked for the private sector and made more money, but we made these intentional decisions to serve the people we live with and to make sure they have what they need to contribute to the society we live in.”

King says that if libraries are going to be the last “small d democratic” place in the city, they need to provide services to their community that other parts of the government aren’t. KPL was the fifth library in the country to have a peer navigator program and also served people with mental health and substance abuse resources. 

“We’ve worked hard for the past five years, my team, to make sure that people feel welcome in the library and that they have connections to services,” King said. 

King returns to East Lansing excited and ready to work. 

Before taking the job in East Lansing, King thought about what he wanted at his next step in the library sector. He had a list of things he wished for, one desire was a smaller staff. 

“I have teams in every single building in KPL, so I don’t get to come to work and talk with everyone I work with face-to-face, and after a while, that got a little hard,” King said. “So I knew at my next job that I wanted to be able to talk to everybody I worked with…I’ve just got a lot of ideas to push the idea of what a public library is forward, and I feel like the city of East Lansing is right for that.”

King already has started forming relationships with the ELPL staff, sending out emails to introduce himself prior to his March 4 start date. He is excited to start working with ELPL staff.

“I can tell the staff is committed to doing the work that I firmly believe in,” King said. “Doing the programming, doing the outreach, doing what we need to do to get people connected to resources. The programs they do are amazing and I’m really excited to start working and be a part of that process.”

As ELPL director, King’s focus will be on getting to know his staff and community. King plans on holding one-on-one meetings with staff members and highlight each of their strengths.

“I plan to get to know their strengths, their weaknesses, assess where they’re at in the organization,” King said. “I like to make sure people feel like they’re in the right spot and that we’re using their skills to the best of their abilities. I think people do the best work when they’re doing meaningful work that they care about. Sometimes people are square pegs in round holes, and we want to make sure that’s not the case.”

To reestablish himself in the community, King has set the goal to meet 300 East Lansing residents in his first 30 days as director. 

“I want to learn about the community, about how it ticks, and about what they want from the library,” King said. 

These goals of getting to know his staff and patrons feed into the work King plans on doing with the library concerning strategic planning, as the ELPL Board of Trustees is in the process of planning for the next fiscal year.

King has helped with three strategic plans in the past and believes that the main objective  should be on learning what the community wants from their library. 

“It’s a multi-prong approach of community feedback, assessing what the library’s good at, assessing what the library’s doing that other people are doing,” King said. “That’s a big part of strategic planning that people don’t understand, assessing the rest of your community and finding out where your strengths are so everyone’s balanced out.”

When putting the needs of the community into a strategic plan, King also emphasizes the need for measurable goals. 

“It’s easy to say the East Lansing Public Library wants to provide great customer support,” King said. “We all do. But how are you measuring that? How are you showing that you’re doing that?…You have to make sure you have tangible, measurable goals. The best plans have those things and they have those things because, in turn, you show the community.”

After learning what the community is looking for from their library and setting these goals, it’s up to the staff to determine where to put resources. 

“In terms of staffing, specifically, I think one of the things we want to do pretty early on, led by the strategic planning process, is a look at re-organization,” King said. “Are we set up to succeed? Are we set up to fulfill the priorities of the strategic plan? We have to make sure we’re set up to do that.”

A week into the job, King is on his way to accomplish his mission of meeting 300 people in 30 days. 

“I’m just really excited to be coming into the community and reintroducing myself and, you know, talking books, talking libraries, talking programs, anything they want to talk about,” King said. “I jokingly say I’m one of 10 extroverted librarians in the country. It’s going to be fun, we’re going to have a good time.”