Ever wonder what makes PSU’s academic leaders tick? What books line their shelves, what inspired them to pursue their field and what visions they have for PSU’s future? Inside Portland State’s new “Deans Decoded” series takes you behind the scenes into the offices of Portland State’s distinguished deans. Join us as we decode the personalities behind the titles, one dean at a time.
Step into Dean Xan Arch’s office at Portland State University’s library, and you’ll find a space filled with stories — deeply rooted in her librarianship and personal connections to the community around her. As a Portland native, Dean Arch’s journey has been shaped by years of experience in library management and collection development, beginning at Stanford University and continuing through Reed College and the University of Portland.
For Dean Arch, libraries are more than buildings filled with books. They are living, evolving hubs of knowledge and discovery. With a passion for making information accessible to all, her work is rooted in equity and connection.
Dean Arch is focused on ensuring that our library remains a dynamic, inclusive space where knowledge is not only stored, but also created and shared.
Inside Portland State’s Ruben Gill Herrera sat down with Dean Arch to chat about her background and the things she’s looking forward to in her new position here at PSU. Watch the video or read the full interview below.
RGH: Hey Dean Arch, how do you start your day?
XA: I'm kind of an early bird. I get up early with my cat, and my coffee, and I start to do a little bit of work email. I know my evenings are busy and I want to get my mind going for my day.
RGH: You have a cat, what’s its name?
XA: Two cats, Dusty and Fern.
RGH: How do you like your coffee?
XA: Coffee is a key part of my morning. So I've been doing this thing — it’s probably a trend —but I put collagen in it for my joints and skin. That, plus cream, and my giant cup just sits there with me in the morning.
RGH: Do you have a favorite coffee spot on campus or in Portland?
XA: I'm still trying to work my way through. I was working out of Vanport for a little while and really got into the Ovation coffee because they had affogatos, especially when I first started my job and everything seemed really overwhelming.
RGH: You seem very active, and you don't have any chairs. Why did you choose not to have a desk chair?
XA: I have plenty of sitting time during my day and, when I'm working at my desk, I plan to just stay standing. That makes it easier for me to stand a little bit during my day at least.
RGH: Can you tell us about the only chair in the room?
XA: This chair was something I feel like I don't sit in enough actually, given that I need to spend some time in a cozy chair. This was from my dad's office. He was a professor at Reed for 40 years. So I moved a few things from his office because it reminds me of him, and they seemed like what I should have for my professional office. This is his rug as well and lamp. Also a sign, which I actually don't know where he took that from. It looks like a street sign.
RGH: I see a lot of plants in your office. Do any of these plants stand out to you or are any of these special?
XA: I have a couple that were gifts when I started here, including one from a former dean of the library who gifted me a plant when I started, which provided a nice sort of a sense of continuity from the past.
RGH: How did you get into taking care of plants?
XA: Well, I started propagating plants. I was really interested in also being able to give the plants I love to friends and families. So making cuttings, growing them in my office and giving them away as gifts is one of the things I was really interested in doing.
RGH: Do you want to talk about any of the paintings that you have up on the wall?
XA: I'm trying to think if there's anything in particular I'd like to talk about with the art. I think the one that people remark about the most and is maybe the most interesting to me would be this octopus. I think there's a lot of folks that love octopi. Also this one was one when I was in Manzanita. I spoke with a fisherman who was also an artist and he was selling his art. This one actually had a name, which is Rosado Floyd. So that one was particularly special to me. It reminds me of the coast here, but I also had such a strong connection with the artist too. That's the one I probably would pick out of all of these.
RGH: What are you currently reading?
XA: Besides the strategic plan, which I'm also reading, I’m reading this beauty, which is “Transforming Qualitative Information: Thematic Analysis and Code Development”. It’s a page turner, and that one's for my dissertation.
RGH: What's your dissertation about?
XA: I'm in the home stretch of my dissertation. I'm writing about search advocacy, which is a practice. I know at PSU we promote equity within the hiring process, which I've been very interested in for a while. I'm really interested in the experience of people doing that kind of work on academic hiring committees and how that works with their institution, their institutional home and their own identity and how that affects their experience in that role.
RGH: Is that a skill you developed to summarize things really easily?
XA: I think summarizing my dissertation topic is less a life skill for me and more that the more I have to say I'm writing something and then someone asks me about it, I have to continue to refine my ability to talk about this particular project over and over. So I don't think it necessarily translates to my conciseness in real life, unfortunately.
RGH: Is there any advice that has helped you along the way in your dissertation that you would like to pass on to somebody also on that journey?
XA: What I found most helpful is forming my connections. I think that's something that I would see as a piece of advice for anyone embarking on that kind of project, like who has done it before, who knows what they're doing and can give you advice along the way. I'm somebody who likes to work in community, and so having those trusted partners to work through when I hit a snag has been really crucial. Another thing is to continue to do little bits on the work every day.
RGH: How do you make time to do something fun? What is something fun for you?
XA: I enjoy raising my kids, I'm not sure if that's exactly fun, but we do enjoy time at the coast. I try to get out and run despite my difficulty in the cold. A lot of it is just trying to find joy in those pieces of time with kids and cats and the community I found here especially.
RGH: What was the last thing you read for fun? What was it about?
XA: I've been reading something called “The Fox Wife” by Yangsze Choo , which I'm really enjoying, so I'd recommend it. I got it from the Oregonian’s Best Fantasy Books of the Year. I've been loving it. It's a genre I hadn't encountered before.
RGH: You’re in a very active zone of campus. Is it distracting? Is it fun? What do you like about it?
XA: There is a lot going on out here. There tend to be people eating, sometimes there's people yelling. Oh, and the football team, actually the football team is the best and the worst part. Their music is energizing, I'd say. There's that song that goes like “shots shots shots”. So sometimes I'm on a Zoom call and in the background, it's just like “shots.” That has been very entertaining, but also kind of nice. I like to feel like there's this active campus life going on around me.
RGH: What was your journey to becoming a dean?
XA: My journey to becoming dean here has been a long history of library management of different types. I started out in the Stanford University library working with electronic content. So people come into library management in a lot of different ways. Often they come from sort of the teaching arm of librarianship. For me, it was from the content purchasing arm, so print and electronic content licensing and buying those items. From there, when I moved back up to Portland, my hometown, I was working at Reed College doing that kind of collection development and then became the dean of libraries at the University of Portland. From there, I made the jump here again in August. It’s been pretty recent and very different schools, even though they have almost all the same words in their name. I really like the dean role in libraries because I'm interested in so many pieces of the work that we do. It gives me the scope to start to talk about the value of libraries in a time when people have questions about that.
RGH: What is the value in both electronic and traditional paper books?
XA: Weighing between print and electronic content has been such an ongoing question for libraries and how we build a collection that serves all those needs. I was thinking about that when you asked about the book I was reading. So of course I'm reading it on a Kindle at this point, even though many of the things I read are in print. I think that while format preferences are shifting, it's not as quick of a process as people might think from the internet in some ways. It's not like everybody now prefers to read online. So I think that those changes are gradual and there are a lot of people who still really prefer the way they interact with the print book. I think there's really room for both. There is also a long print history that isn't even available online that we sometimes forget.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity by Brianna Vasquez.
Photography by Jeremy Chun Sajqui