Meet the Dean: Spotlight on Emy Decker, Dean of the University Library

Emy Decker joined CSUN in July 2025 as Dean of the CSUN University Library. She grew up in Southern California, attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, as an undergrad, and worked her way up to completing a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration. Dean Decker has built her career in library and information science, and she also holds certificates in gemology from the Gemological Institute of America (“I believe there is a gemstone out there for everyone’s budget...”). Decker lives with her husband, Sean, and two cats (Ruby, the Siamese, and Polly, the polydactyl), and is re-learning the alto saxophone.   

Dean Decker, how did you start on the path toward this career and this position as dean at CSUN?  
My very first job was as a volunteer at the local library where I grew up in Southern California. After that, all my library jobs have been in the academic arena, and I realized I really enjoyed it. I attended the University of Chicago to pursue a master's degree in art history, and upon completing the program, a position opened in the art history department. This position was essentially a library-type role. I was cataloging digital images, and building a digital image database really appealed to me, so I decided to pursue a career in libraries. I went on to get a Master's of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia.

What about libraries appealed to you? 
 I’m passionate about empowering individuals by connecting them with the information they need, precisely when they need it. Contributing to that information life cycle—whether through access, organization, or guidance—has been deeply rewarding. I’ve focused on academic libraries because I genuinely enjoy collaborating with faculty, students, and staff to support learning, research, and community engagement.

How did you find your way to CSUN? 
It was one of those things where all the pieces came together at the same time. I had just finished my Ph.D. in higher ed administration, which I pursued because I had a background in libraries, but I needed a 30,000-foot view of the university in general. I needed to know about sports programs, admissions, student success, and budgets, and those were things that I hadn't really encountered in library science. My dissertation was about nontraditional students, so I was invested in learning about their unique needs. CSUN is a campus that focuses on the various needs of nontraditional students, and so it felt like a really good fit. The environment, the ethos, and the priorities here align well with my personal philosophies, so I was excited when the position was posted. When I left the University of Chicago, I took a similar position at the University of Georgia, in Athens, and ended up living in the state of Georgia for 14 years. I especially enjoyed living in metro- Atlanta and made wonderful friends there. During that time, I worked for the Atlanta University Center, and then Georgia Tech. All representing increasingly responsible positions. When the Associate Dean position opened at the University of Alabama, I realized I was ready for the next step, and the portfolio areas were aligned with my research, so that is what took me there. 

When I saw the posting for Dean of the University Library at CSUN and being the kind of institution it is—a minority-serving university, with the largest enrollment of deaf and hard-of-hearing students among mainstream universities—I knew I could make a difference. Having researched non-traditional students for my dissertation (and my husband having completed his BA and MA as an adult learner), I know that many times students who are not the absolute textbook traditional students get left behind. And all of these things make CSUN a richly faceted, very exciting environment to me.   

And so far, how has Cal State Northridge been for you? 
It's been wonderful! I enjoy all the library faculty and staff members I've been meeting. I have successfully completed, I believe, 84 thirty-minute one-on-one conversations, which was the first part of my listening tour. Getting to know everybody was very inspiring, and connecting with them has been truly uplifting. So many of the employees in the library started here as student assistants. That kind of love for an institution, that kind of connection, that kind of family, is so valuable. You can see the passion that people have. We're creating the next generation with that deep foundation.

Could we discuss some of your published work? Let’s start with the piece during COVID, about the chat service. 
The University of Alabama [where I was during the beginning of the pandemic] only closed from March to July of 2020. But during that time, I was able to work from home, and it gave me an opportunity to think about how we could pivot our method of offering the services our users were used to receiving to the online environment. At that point in time, all we had was the 24-hour email for “Ask a Librarian.” And we quickly realized we were going to need much more than that, because nobody was on site. 

We set up a chat service, which was interesting, because we all had to teach ourselves how to do it was by connecting to one another over Zoom.  This wasn’t the best venue for training library employees on a previously unused technology. And once we reopened, we realized this was a great opportunity for our student assistants to get involved as well. So, we taught them how to operate the chat. It is still a service that's there today because of the success we had during COVID. And, of course, we have a chat service here at CSUN.  

I co-edited a book on disaster management and contingency planning, which has always been an interest of mine, and it proved to be very relevant, of course. One reason CSUN appealed to me was the resilience that I saw after the 1994 earthquake. 

The books I’ve written have aligned closely with my research interests and the evolving needs of the field at the time. Interestingly, nearly every academic library I’ve worked in was undergoing renovation during my tenure, which gave me hands-on experience with space planning, user-centered design, and project coordination. That cumulative involvement naturally informed the book I co-authored on library design, allowing me to translate practical insights into a broader professional resource.

It’s interesting how libraries are just not buildings full of books anymore. They're not warehouses where you store print items. What's really growing is the use of space. Libraries are great spaces for collaboration, for all kinds of different media and technology engagement. And these collaborative spaces are really the way of the future.

It sounds like today's library is very different from yesterday's. How would you define that? 
Well, my own experience was being on the edge of the digital transition. My original job in libraries was to create a robust digital database—that was accessible and searchable—from a 35-millimeter slide collection. So I really saw that transition. And I also saw how some faculty struggled with it. They did not want to give up their slides, they did not want to move from analog to digital. That’s how I got into teaching, because I realized having an opportunity to sit with somebody who felt uncomfortable or insecure with the evolving technology - once you work with them as their tour guide- they were very able to connect and find a point of access. 

That’s how I learned AI—I literally sat next to a colleague, and he showed me how he used it until I became comfortable with it on my own. It takes patience and courage to do that. 

What are some of your goals for the future? 
I believe that the academic library is the center of campus, and because we work with all the departments, staff, faculty, and students, we have to be extremely flexible and also need to anticipate their needs. Part of that initiative has involved strategies with jumping into the deep end with AI and working to prepare tomorrow's users for the environment they're going to encounter when it comes to information, and how to understand and create opportunities to find that information. So, I think it's important for libraries to always be aware of what the trends are, and to be able to create points of access for our users, so that we're facilitating ways for everybody to participate and to engage. Within the library, I'm going to be looking at strategies for enhancing our outreach to campus. The librarians have already had a very robust strategy for connecting with their faculty, and during New Faculty Orientation, I observed even more opportunities to connect with incoming faculty. It got me thinking about how it's easier to have venues where you get new faculty coming in; you connect with them, and then you can follow up, because you've met them in person. It can be harder to find the existing, established faculty who may not realize that the library services are continuing to evolve, and there may be different points and different services they would enjoy. So I want to redouble our efforts this coming year to look at campus outreach and look for new partnerships. There is so much love for this institution in ways that I haven't seen at my previous five institutions, and I think that that's a wonderful starting point to open up those conversations.