Department of Media, Career Studies and Leadership Development

Dr. McAllister received his Ed.D. from Appalachian State University in 2021. His dissertation, Space Invasion in the Academic Library: A Poststructural Analysis Using Discourse, Power/Knowledge, and Biopower, was selected as the Alice Phoebe Naylor Outstanding Dissertation Award winner. He also holds an MLIS and an MM in Music History from the University of South Carolina at Columbia, a BA in Music with Honors from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He has worked in a variety of library settings including public, special, and academic libraries. Before coming to Appalachian State University, he worked as a public services librarian at a community college, and prior to that he worked in the North Carolina Room, a special collection, as part of the New Hanover County Public Library. He worked as Humanities Librarian and Coordinator of Collection Management for the Appalachian State University Libraries. He also served as liaison to multiple departments in the humanities teaching information literacy classes and managing library collections.

He has presented widely including international conferences in London and Spain, and regularly at the Charleston Conference, the leading conference on library collections in North America. His research interests include academic library trends, poststructuralism, and leadership and management.

McAllister’s research interests are focused on poststructuralism and the intersection of different areas of librarianship including leadership and management of academic libraries, collections, and space.

Selected Publications and Presentations

Publications

• McAllister, Alex D.; Flierl, Michael; Caswell, Thomas R.; Costello, Laura; Hall, Anita R.; Li, Cindy; Maher, Monica; Piorun, Mary; Prud’homme, Patrice-Andre; Quigley, Brian D.; and Walker, Gregory, (2022). “2022 Top Trends in Academic Libraries,” College & Research Libraries News, 83(6), 243. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.83.6.243
• McAllister, A.D. & Scherlen, A. (2017). Weeding with wisdom: Tuning deselection of print monographs in book-reliant disciplines. Collection Management, 42(2), 76-91. [Peer-reviewed journal article]

Presentations

• Charleston Conference – Charleston, SC Losing Our Libraries: Misguided Leadership – Alex McAllister, Robert Hollandsworth, Allan Scherlen, Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition (November, 2022).
• Seventeenth International Conference on Books, Publishing, and Libraries– University of Granada, Spain. Library Service Learning and Border Pedagogy. McAllister, Alex. (July 2019).
• Fifteenth International Conference on Books, Publishing, and Libraries – Imperial College of London. Mass Weeding in University Libraries and Its Effects on Humanities Research. McAllister, Alex (July 2017).