Mihoko Hosoi started her career in the hotel and airline industries in Japan, where she developed her ability to make people feel heard and welcomed.

It’s an approach that she’s brought with her to library management, a field in which she’s worked for over two decades leading to her joining UC Riverside as university librarian in October.

“It turned out that it’s such an important foundation to be an effective library manager because we are in a service business,” Hosoi said.

For her, that means observing and listening to students, faculty members, and others who use the Orbach Science and Tomás Rivera libraries to ensure their experience is a positive one and they find library materials for their research.

Before joining UCR, Hosoi managed academic libraries at several colleges and universities, most recently at Pennsylvania State University, or Penn State, where she obtained her doctorate in higher education and worked as the chief officer for Collections, Research, and Scholarly Communications. Earlier, she was a business librarian at Stanford and Cornell and developed her organizational and negotiation skills through those experiences. She’s no stranger to the University of California, having worked at UC Santa Barbara and as assistant director for systemwide licensing for the UC system’s California Digital Library. 

Hosoi said she was attracted to UCR by the university’s reputation as a champion of social mobility, and its large first-generation student population.

“I thought that it was such a special opportunity to make use of my knowledge and experience but in an environment where social mobility is encouraged and supported,” she said.

As a first-generation student herself, Hosoi noted that librarians can play a meaningful role in welcoming students who don’t have a family college history they can lean on for guidance on how to navigate the resources available to them.

Hosoi has spent her first month meeting with campus leaders. A top priority for her is reaching out to the colleges, schools, and departments to improve communication with campus partners in how the library can support them.

“I view my work as a storyteller,” she said. “I want us to be more visible and connected to the campus and community.”

Hosoi said she was drawn to a career in library management because it involves both collaborating with people and organizing details. But she didn’t have a straightforward path to the profession.

Hosoi grew up in Saitama, Japan, a city about 40 miles north of Tokyo, in what she described as a traditional Japanese household where she was encouraged to learn teamaking, flower arranging, and calligraphy. Her father worked in telecommunications and her mother was a singer who loved Elvis Presley and liked to ride a motorcycle.

But her parents had modest expectations for her and were surprised when Hosoi told them she wanted to go to college. At their suggestion, she enrolled in a local junior college, instead of a four-year university.

She didn’t enjoy the experience and ended up leaving to focus on a side business she started as an English interpreter for tourists. That led to a job offer with United Airlines as a representative promoting their mileage program. After a year with the airline, a hotel executive who regularly traveled on her routes suggested she come work for the Sheraton in Tokyo Bay.

She became a concierge for guests that needed special attention, meeting celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Liza Minelli, and Sammy Davis, Jr., as well as reputed Japanese gangsters.

Her success at the hotel led her supervisors to recommend she study hospitality management at Cornell University. Hosoi went back to college, first getting her bachelor’s degree in Spanish language and literature from Seisen University, Tokyo, and later a master’s degree from Cornell. 

In the meantime, Hosoi had married an American and immigrated to Durham, North Carolina, where her husband was a graduate student at Duke University. They had a newborn son, and she didn’t want to go back to the hotel industry at the time but was looking for work. 

While pushing a stroller on campus, she struck up a conversation with a librarian at Duke, asking what sort of jobs were available for someone like Hosoi who spoke English, Japanese, Spanish, and French. The librarian told her they were looking for language specialists who could process foreign language materials.

“So 30 years ago, this casual conversation at Duke University opened the door for me,” Hosoi said. 

She took a job as a technical services specialist at the Duke library while enrolling in a master’s program in library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Hosoi said she found her calling in library management and felt she brought a unique viewpoint as an immigrant and Asian woman, who are underrepresented in the profession.

“The core value of librarianship is to contribute to education equity,” she said. “We are here to support everyone. We are not judging anyone, we are not professors grading people, but we are here for anyone who needs support in a very neutral, safe space.”