SPOTLIGHT
Residential Program Alumni

Suzette Spencer serves as the Director of Library and Information Services at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. Her 25-year career in public and academic libraries has been dedicated to being a change agent for equal access to library resources for students, faculty, and staff with a committed focus to lifelong learning opportunities for community users. Some of her recent accomplishments include the elimination of library fines for the physical open shelf collection for students and community users who are most in need of accessing library services and resources. In collaboration with an internal Library Implementation Team, Ms. Spencer co-led a 2-year project successfully migrating the  library services platform to a 21 st century cloud-based system. Also, in support of the College’s mission to cultivate a sense of belonging for everyone, an e-textbook program was developed to support college affordability and z-course creation by helping faculty discover and adopt no-cost, high-quality e-books and e-textbooks for their courses. This program has saved students and the College substantial costs over the last three years and has been documented as a co-authored chapter “Unintended Consequences: How Centralizing Collection Development Practices Facilitated Launch of a Successful e-textbook Program During COVID” in the forthcoming book, The Community College Library: Collections and Technical Services.

Ms. Spencer holds a bachelor’s degree in Human Resources Management and Finance from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and her master’s degree in Information and Library Science from Pratt Institute in New York City, New York. She is a alumna of the MOLLI 2023 Residential Program and a 2023 recipient of the Doug Gray Leadership Award.