Kirsten Leonard is the Executive Director of Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) in Indianapolis, Indiana. She oversees eleven full and part-time staff and coordinators who are working to support innovation and collaboration. Kirsten holds a MLIS from Wayne State University and an MA from Case Western Reserve University. As the CEO of PALNI, she prioritizes and completes strategic objectives from all functional areas and needs of the PALNI libraries through the PALNI group structures and shared staff. By reducing duplication of effort, this deeper collaboration has allowed staff in PALNI libraries to focus, explore, and innovate to more effectively address user needs and provide better service to students and faculty. She is an advocate for library collaboration having served on the OCLC Global Council and the International Coalition of Library Consortia Coordinating committee and serves on the board of the Academic Libraries of Indiana.
Prior to joining PALNI, Kirsten was at Indiana University Kokomo as the Assistant Director of Institutional Research and Electronic Resources/Documents Librarian. She has also held librarian positions at Ball State University and Kettering University. Other academic appointments include Assistant Director of the Technical Writing program at Case Western Reserve University. She has conducted research on library web pages, published a chapter on electronic resource management, and was an author on the Indiana White Paper on the Future of Cataloging. She is a graduate of the Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians, and is a recurring keynote speaker on deep collaboration to consortia and groups of academic libraries. She has led multiple Indiana University system-wide, PALNI, and ALI review processes and negotiations for library systems, services, and resources. She has led the ALI Shared Print project (2012-) and subsequent ALI Collaborative Development, and ALI Shared Collections initiatives, and chairs the PALNI Collection Management Policy Group.
