Mark Paul’s family described him as “bookish” when he was a child living in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, he’s completed 22 years of working as a professional librarian. Starting this semester, Paul joined Northwestern University in Qatar as the new library director.

When he was in fifth and sixth grade, Paul would read stories from the library and narrate them to the first graders. “My sister would tell me I have lots of book smarts but no street smarts,” he said, with a chuckle. In seventh and eighth grade, he worked in the library of his school, where his primary responsibility was to set up movies and filmstrips on the projectors.

For his undergraduate education at the University of Louisville, Paul majored in business administration as he was interested in finance. To pay for his tuition, Paul worked in the library of his university. “That’s where I first started developing my interest in working in a library,” he recalled.

After graduating, Paul worked at a bank for two years. It was during this period that he realized that he didn’t want to work in the business industry. “I wanted to go back to my university where I felt good and happy,” he said. He decided to follow his desires and returned to University of Louisville as a librarian. “I felt better about being in the library system where I felt that I was making a contribution to education.”

But while working at the library, Paul realized that he wanted to do more. He knew that to become a professional librarian, he needed to get appropriate credentials. So he left his job in Louisville and enrolled at the University of Illinois to get his masters in Library and Information Science. He soon became familiar with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois because he had many friends studying there at the time. But it wasn’t until many years later that he would consider joining Northwestern, let alone move to Qatar.

Paul was offered a job at the University of Illinois’ engineering library before he even graduated. After working there for a year, he moved back to Louisville to be closer to his family. After working at the University of Louisville for another 15 years, Paul started looking for other jobs. “I wanted to revitalize what I was doing and look for new challenges,” he said. He then moved to the Caribbean to start a library from scratch at the University of St. Marin, a small liberal arts university, where he also taught courses on instructional technology and communications.

It was while working in the Caribbean that Paul came across an opportunity to work in the Qatar National Library (QNL). “It was right for me, it was interesting for me and I felt that it would be a challenging experience,” he said, recalling his decision to come to Qatar.

Paul served as the head of partnerships at QNL, a responsibility that dealt with partnering with national libraries around the world to digitize materials related to Qatar and the Gulf. One of his major projects was QNL’s partnership with the British Library, through which they digitized what will be 1.5 million pages of historical documents detailing the relationship between India, Britain and the Gulf.

After successfully working on the digitization project with the British Library , Paul started looking for a challenge because he felt his life had become too “routine,” he said. He then came across an opening for the library director position at NU-Q, and decided to apply. “When I was being interviewed, I immediately felt like I was back home [in a university]. It immediately felt comfortable,” Paul said, adding that he longed to work at a university again. “I missed having interactions with students,” he said.

At NU-Q, Paul is working on making the library’s services more efficient. He plans to take student viewpoints into consideration—adding more of what students find useful in the library and canceling other services that students can do without.

When NU-Q moves to its new building, Paul is excited to have almost double the space of the current library. He plans to expand the number and variety of books for the new library. “We will start by moving our existing collection over and then the library will begin a controlled growth plan to increase the collection over time, balanced with digital acquisitions too,” he said.

Correction: September 28, 2016
An earlier version of this article misquoted Mark Paul and has since been updated to reflect his true meaning about how he felt while being interviewed for NU-Q.