Susan Hornung named new Executive Director of ASCLA and RUSA

Please welcome Susan Hornung to ALA as the new Executive Director of both the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA) and the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA).

Susan will be attending the 2009 ALA Annual Conference as executive director designate and will officially join ALA on July 27, 2009.

Susan Hornung is currently the Director of Knowledge Management and the Severson Center, the Alliance for Children and Families, in Milwaukee (WI), a position she has held since 1986.  The Alliance for Children and Families is a national membership association whose members are family- and child-serving nonprofit organizations.  The Severson National Information Center provides information and knowledge to members of the Alliance, as well as to the staff and board of the Families International group of companies. In that position, Susan has created, implemented and supported communities of practice; developed and managed the National Trend Advisory Committee and National Severson Center Advisory Committee; developed and been responsible for a major branding project; and led the successful effort to make the Alliance the first national membership association to achieve Council on Accreditation recognition, improving the organization’s continuous quality improvement program and use of best practices.

Prior to joining the Alliance, Susan Hornung was the Reference and Adult Services Director (1979-1986) at the Minnesota Valley Regional Library in Mankato (MN). Prior positions included serving as a Library Consultant at the Quinco Mental Health Center and Reference Librarian at the Bartholomew County Public Library, both in Columbus (IN).

She is a graduate of Indiana University in Bloomington (IN), both A.B. (major in English and minor in French) and M.L.S. (1976).  She is currently enrolled in the Alliance for Children and Families’ Executive Leadership Institute, a two-year nonprofit management certification program sponsored and held at the University of Michigan.

Susan Hornung is presently the president-elect of the Wisconsin chapter of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) and a member of the Executive Board of the Library Council of Metropolitan Milwaukee. 

Thanks for a successful search process go to members of the committee: Carol Ann Desch, president, ASCLA; Neal Wyatt, president, RUSA; Cathleen Bourdon, ALA Associate Executive Director, Communications & Member Relations; Beth Yoke, Executive Director, YALSA; and, Mary Pullen, ALA Human Resources Recruiter and to the staff of ASCLA/RUSA and others who participated in the search process.