Hoover Library Board names Amanda Borden as new director
The Hoover Public Library Board tonight voted unanimously to name one of its assistant directors, Amanda Borden, as the library’s new director.
Borden, who has worked at the Hoover library for nearly 16 years and been an assistant director for more than 10 years, will replace Linda Andrews when she retires at the end of the year.
She was the only applicant for the job, and Library Board Chairwoman Sara Rast said Borden was the most qualified person. Library Board members indicated when they posted the director’s job vacancy that they wanted someone with experience at the Hoover library who was familiar with the operations there.
The other longtime assistant director, Patricia Guarino, indicated from the beginning that she would not seek the director’s job, saying it might not be too many years until she retires as well.
That made the decision easy for the Library Board, board member Michael Krawcheck said. One of the best things a leader can do is train someone who can do the leader’s job when the leader leaves, and Andrews aptly established a line of succession as she trained both Borden and Guarino, he said.
Borden is a natural for the director’s job, and the fact that Guarino will stay on to assist Borden is a blessing for the library, Krawcheck said.
“You complement each other,” he told the two women during tonight’s board meeting. “We have a culture here that you two understand, and it’s very important that that culture be understood and continue to be perpetuated. … To me, it’s a wonderful transition.”
Rast said the Library Board, Andrews and her staff have worked hard to build a library where everyone feels welcome and the board doesn’t want to do anything to change that. “We want to keep it as close to we can as to how it has been,” she said.
Borden is the right fit to maintain the library’s success, Rast said.
Not only is she well-trained by Andrews, but she also has a master’s degree in library science, 20 years under her belt as an administrator and an understanding of how important it is to keep a balanced budget, Rast said.
“If we could clone Linda, we would have gotten us another Linda, but this is as close as we could get,” Rast said.
Borden said she’s thrilled and excited to get the appointment and looks forward to working with the rest of the library staff and city leadership in the future. She has been preparing herself for this job for a long time, she said.
When she was 21 years old and in library school at the University of Alabama, Andrews came and spoke to her class, she said.
“It was just like it clicked,” she said. “I knew I wanted to work for her and for the Hoover library. And if I couldn’t, I wanted to do what she had done here in another library.”
Borden was able to get an internship at the Hoover library in the spring of 1993, but when she finished her internship, there were no full-time job openings there, so she got a job as a children’s librarian at the downtown branch of the Birmingham Public Library.
She did that job for three years and then spent three years managing the children’s department at Birmingham’s Springville Road branch and about 1½ years managing the children’s and circulation departments at the Pelham Public Library before finally landing a job at the Hoover Public Library as manager of the children’s department in 2001. After five years in that role, she was promoted in 2006 to assistant director and now oversees the 44 employees in the children’s, teen and circulation departments.
“I have worked for this all my life,” she said. “It’s my dream job … I’m really just on top of the world.”
However, Borden said she realizes Andrews leaves behind some really big shoes to fill. “I really want to respect her legacy in the way I perform this job,” she said.
Andrews always has focused on customer service and making the library a community center where people want to gather, and she wants to continue with that vision, she said.
Borden, 45, lives in Hoover’s Chace Lake community with her husband, Allen.