The Librarian

If the popular image of the librarian is of a serious woman with glasses and hair pulled into a bun, the archivist is the greying man who is the prickly custodian of dusty files. Guy Berthiaume, who finished his career as the head of Library and Archives Canada, is neither one.

Gregarious and clever, Berthiaume has written Mes grandes bibliothèques: Mes archives, mes mémoires (My great libraries: My archives, my memories), a shrewd management textbook disguised as a memoir. In this candid account, he describes how he learned from bad bosses and good ones; how he developed a sense of when to stay in a job and when to move on; and how he managed to expand the horizons of every institution he served. As he explains in the preface, he decided to write a memoir rather than an autobiography because he believed his professional life was more interesting and more instructive than his...