Profiles | Bay Area Library & Information Network

Category: Profiles

Profiles of people and organizations around the Bay Area

Richmond now has it’s own seed-lending library

By BayNet | Published: July 20, 2010

Another great outside-the-box idea:

At the seed library, people can “check out” healthy seeds, use them to plant herbs, vegetables and flowers, and return new seeds from the resulting plants at the end of the season. The seed check-out process is self-service and it’s explained on the Richmond Grows website. Interested people can sign up for 45-minute orientations offered at the library several times a month and/or watch a 10 minute video at their website that clearly explains the process.

This seed library is another effort that Richmond residents are making to grow food locally and build community, and Richmond’s is the first one in the nation to operate at a more traditional public library. “We put it in a public space because we wanted the entire public to have access,” Newburn said.

Link: Richmond now has it’s own seed-lending library

Also posted in East Bay |

Q&A: Librarian Susan Geiger and Moreau Catholic High School

By BayNet | Published: March 1, 2010

An ongoing look at BayNet members who work in libraries and information services around the Bay Area.

How did you become a high school librarian?
My early career was in a public library as a children’s librarian and then as young adult librarian. I moved on to become a Branch Librarian but knew working with teens was what I really enjoyed.When I heard about the position at Moreau Catholic High School I was attracted to the idea of having a captive audience of teens. What I soon learned was that I would have three categories of patrons – students, teachers, and administration each with different needs. Also the idea of a school schedule with a long summer break was very attractive to me as the mother of a two year old.

Librarian Susan Geiger

How has technology impacted your role as a school librarian?
The library team’s role has changed as the school embraced technology. We are first-line tech support for over 900 students and their laptops. As the only information professional in the school, it’s my job to keep teachers and administrators aware of current research, curriculum trends, and useful web tools.  My Twitter stream, blog reader, and social networks are composed almost entirely of library, education, and educational technology sources.

My staff and I do a lot of instructional and technical support for teachers. They come to us with an idea or a lesson plan, and we try to find the best technology and resources to support their learning objectives. In the process we provide information literacy instruction to their students. We create digital pathfinders using LibGuides software that allows us to embed RSS feeds, video and other media.  We do presentations on Digital parenting to help our parents understand and work with their digital native children.

One of the biggest changes I have seen since becoming a laptop school is the transformation of the library into a production space.  Students use our conference room to record voice-overs and to edit video, and it’s common to find kids filming all over the library. We have 3 flat screen TVs in the library that screen MCTV, our student run, digital TV station. We also use the TVs to run new book promotions that we create in powerpoint, save as jpgs and play as slide shows.  We have two drop down LCD screens in the main seating area that students use to give presentations. Recently the library hosted a Skype conference for an AP Government class with an alumna, Rosie Rios, the US Treasurer.

The library is a very popular place on our campus.  Students come to check out books, flash drives, headphones, and video cameras. They use our tables to work in groups, and our power outlets to charge their laptops . They ask for help in person, by chat, and even by email. They become fans on our Facebook page. The students see the library as a learning commons.

Lunch hour in the Moreau Catholic High School Library

Lunch hour in the Moreau Catholic High School Library

What school projects you’ve done that you’re the most proud of?
When my school was three years into our roll out as a 1:1 laptop school, it became obvious to me that our faculty needed to become more comfortable using their laptops.  My staff and I led a “23 Things” web 2.0 staff development program using the CSLA 23 Things Classroom Learning program as a model. The program was pretty successful because we did a lot of marketing and had great support from our administration. The incentive to sign up for the 9-week program was that the participants were allowed to wear jeans every Friday. We designed a black t-shirt with the school logo and the legend, “23 Things for 21st century Learners.” Our school has a dress code and wearing jeans is a big deal.

We made a promotional video featuring teachers and administrators to introduce 23 Things and an Animoto video of the first people to sign up and create blogs.  Seventy-seven administrators, teachers and staff signed up. Every Friday was Tech Friday when my staff and I provided personal assistance and treats.  By going into the offices and classrooms of people setting up blogs and using various web tools we provided, “Roadside Assistance”.  In the process we forged a lot of personal relationships, taught a lot of people how to use their toolbar menu, and established the library as a “go to” place for technical assistance.

What was the most memorable experience you had as a librarian?
Three years , prepare for a library remodel and expansion, I moved my entire library into four storage rooms and two classrooms.  I planned the move on graph paper and had the book collection measured down to the inch on spreadsheets. We broke down shelves and then moved and reassembled all of the shelving and most of the book collection during a three-week period. I have memories of standing on study carrels, socket wrench in hand, dismantling our lovely old wood wall shelving. I still can’t believe we got everything done in time.

Moreau Catholic High School Library

What do you love and hate about your job?
I love just about everything about my job, especially helping students find recreational reading and working with teachers on making curriculum relevant and exciting. As a school librarian in an independent school I get to do a bit of everything: acquisitions, reference, cataloging, marketing, web design, staff development, and teaching. It’s very satisfying to come up with the perfect piece of research for an administrator taking a graduate course, the perfect book to hook a 10th grade reluctant reader, and the perfect resource or web tool to fit a teacher’s curriculum need all in the same period.

There has been a lot of press lately about whether schools still need libraries because of a perception that students don’t use books anymore.  I think this is a ridiculous argument because students and faculty need books, electronic resources, and librarians. What has changed is that I buy much less reference and non-fiction in print. One of our challenges is to teach students how to use databases and eBooks, which they sometimes find complex after their search experiences with Google.

The food police role is probably the least favorite part of my job. I wish we could have a library café area, but our new library is carpeted.

Are you impacted by the California economic downturn?
As an independent school we are dependent on our families being able to afford tuition.  While the school is committed to providing as much tuition assistance as possible, it’s still a struggle for many of our families. Compared to the catastrophic budget cuts affecting librarian positions in public schools, the independent school sector has been pretty fortunate.  Still, many of my colleagues and I are trying to do more with fewer resources these days.

Any advice for SLIS students thinking about becoming a high school librarian?
It’s great job because you get to do a bit of everything, but it would help to be into multi-tasking and screaming teens.

Also posted in East Bay | Tagged |

PROFILE: Lauren John of the Town and Country Club in San Francisco

By BayNet | Published: February 8, 2010

Lauren John is BayNet’s newest board representative for special libraries. A librarian for the San Francisco’s Town and Country Club, she organizes monthly literary discussions and leads book groups. Her groups have appeared in public libraries, bookstores, boardrooms, museums, living rooms, retirement communities and synagogues. At Infopeople, she has taught librarians how to run book discussion groups and is the author of Running Book Discussion Groups: A How To Do It Manual.

How did you decide to become a librarian?
I originally thought that I would be a journalist and I took lot of writing and media classes in college at the State University of New York at Binghamton, which I attended from 1974-1978.

In my media and society class in my senior year, I wrote a paper about the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast that Orson Welles did on Halloween night. In the broadcast he announced that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Preposterous as that sounds today, people believed him and there was widespread national panic.

The paper that I wrote was about how and why people believed the broadcast. I went to the university library looking for answers, and the reference librarian there (wish I could remember her name) told me that I could go back to the newspapers for 1938 and read the news accounts of the broadcast and the reactions to it in the editorials. I spent hours and hours in the library looking at primary source documents on microfilm – fascinated by the letters to the editors and also sidetracked by the fashion ads. I soon realized that I was hooked on the research as much as the writing. (The paper got an A).

When I graduated from college, still unsure of what I was going to choose as a career – I took a summer class at St. John’s University School of Library Science in Jamaica, Queens. The class was about the publishing industry and the teacher was Patricia Glass Schuman – who later founded Neal-Schuman publishers. I loved the class and enrolled in the MLS program in the Fall. Note – Neal-Schuman published my book Running Book Discussion Groups in 2006.

Read More »

Also posted in BayNet Libraries, San Francisco | Tagged |

PROFILE: Heidi Goldstein and Ex’pression College for Digital Arts

By BayNet | Published: November 16, 2009

This is an ongoing series of profiles of BayNet members who work in little-known libraries and information services around the bay. Heidi Goldstein is the Head Librarian of Ex’pression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville.

Ex'pression College for Digital Arts. Photo by Tiffany Lo.

Ex'pression College for Digital Arts. Photo by Tiffany Lo.

How did you decide to become a librarian?

I’ve always been a reader and a lover of books. At about fifteen, I decided that librarianship would be a great career for me as I knew I didn’t want to be a standard classroom teacher. I knew that I loved to organize anything I could and figure out systems of order for things of all types. I also knew that I liked helping people and loved the concept of instructing people on how to help themselves. I worked in retail bookselling, both as a bookseller and as a manager, and knew that loaning people books was more appealing to me than charging for them.

Heidi Goldstein

Heidi Goldstein

In between bookstore jobs, I worked in a huge mess of a vintage clothing store. I had the task of putting it in some order. I devised my own system that included: sparkly Supremes dresses, fifties daytime dresses, sixties cocktail dresses, ironic seventies t-shirts, lederhosen, and so on. It was a mental challenge and included fashion history research and I loved every bit of it. I knew that librarianship was the perfect field into which I should delve.

Also, my mother still swears that she told me, when I was about 3 years of age, that I would grow up to be a librarian. At 37 years old, I now have to agree that she was right!

In what ways is a digital arts school library different from the more traditional school libraries?

The Wintzen Library and Learning Resource Center, while not large in size, is vast in its resourcefulness. Our students tend to focus on manuals and software usage more so than the traditional academic learning institutions as many of our classes are software-based. Ex’pression College, in and of itself, is different in that we are a fast-paced, learning-intensive, 24 hour a day, 365 day a week school. Our library, currently open only to enrolled students, has over three thousand books that range from, but are not limited to: children’s books to animal anatomy, jazz biographies to Star Wars history, acoustics and physics comprehension to logo construction, and rock and roll graphic design to punk rock music history. We also have an extensive DVD collection which includes concerts, tutorials, general films that tend toward the cult classic and hyper-creative, animation, experimental, and documentaries.

The library is also where all students come to attain their textbooks. For the General Education classes, they may borrow their books for the length of the term (five weeks). For the classes that represent the respective programs, Sound Arts, Animation and Visual Effects, Motion Graphic Design, and Game Art and Design, the library gives the students their textbooks which they then may keep for their professional library. This figures greatly in the activities of the library while saving the students large amounts of money from having to purchase their books.

Our library is similar to other schools as it is a hub of information, a central location in which students may print out papers, and where tutoring occurs. As the librarian, I help students with papers, research, and writing.

Ex’pression College uses Web 2.0 tools extensively: blogs, twitter, Facebook, and etc. How has this impacted your library work, if at all?

I believe that the school’s involvement with Web 2.0 has increased our brand recognition all around. The Web has permitted a small, niche-market Bachelor’s degree-granting school to gain international publicity. The library utilizes Twitter and Facebook to communicate with Ex’pression students who might not come into the library on a regular basis. Updates are made to Twitter, Facebook, and various other school-based websites regarding new additions to the library catalog and various events that happen around the school and in the library. Communicating with students in the way they communicate with each other has infinitely assisted in increasing the library’s appeal and communication levels.

What is your most memorable library experience?

My most memorable library experience is as simple and as pure as library experiences come. A student came in to talk to me about life and some difficulties she was having. I listened and advised as anyone would. But then, I used my super-reader-recommendation skills to come up with something wonderful for her to read. Lynda Barry has been my favorite comic artist/writer for a long time. A peer of Matt Groening of “The Simpsons,” she writes bittersweet, semi-autobiographical reflections on life, adolescence, and the complicated intertwining of family, awkwardness, and self-awareness. I offered one of Barry’s books, 100 Demons, to the student who was having troubles. A few days later she came into the library, eyes glistening, book in hand. “You reminded me how much I love to read,” she said shyly, “thank you.”

More recently, I was thrown a huge surprise birthday party by one of the library assistants, who is a student here at Ex’pression. The library had been decorated, a DJ had set up speakers, many of the people in attendance wore Guy Fawkes’ masks and an Ex’pression alumnus had airbrushed a 4 foot long painting of me that lots of people had signed. At least sixty people were in attendance, food was eaten, and much fun was had. This was not the same kind of memorable library experience as the previous one…but still memorable nonetheless!

Any good advice for new librarians still looking for work?

I started out looking for a hearty, civil service job in the public library sector. I envisioned helping those who needed help figuring out how to navigate the Web, performing the hardcore reference interview, and eagerly receiving the random question. As San Jose State University is the largest MLIS program in the country and competition is fierce, acquiring a public library job was more difficult than I could have ever imagined. I ended up, six months after getting my Master’s degree, with a job here at Ex’pression College in a position nothing like that which I had expected.

My advice would be this: keep your mind open and prospects wide open. The unexpected could be better than that which you originally hoped for!

Also posted in East Bay |

PROFILE: Deborah Hunt and Information Edge

By BayNet | Published: October 26, 2009

BayNet is doing a series of profiles of members who work in little-known libraries and information services around the bay. Deborah Hunt is the Principal of Information Edge, an information service based in San Leandro, California, and a long time BayNet member.

How did you become interested in working in information services?

Deborah Hunt

Deborah Hunt

As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I worked part-time at Moffitt Library as a Student Assistant. I saw how the reference librarians worked with students to help them find information and that interested me. I also took the library introduction course and found a whole new world about how libraries work and decided the information world was for me. I then applied to the UC Berkeley Library School and started my studies right after finishing my undergraduate program.

Right before I graduated from library school, there was a glut of librarians in the Bay Area and I was not able to relocate to find work. We had a “job board” in South Hall (where the library school was located) and an engineering firm had called the school looking for a student to organize their library. I called the number, interviewed and wrote a proposal, stressing that I would be graduating in 2 weeks and expected to come onboard as a professional, not as a student. I was hired immediately and began work as a consultant to this engineering firm. I was there for 3 months. Many of their clients saw my work, which led to more consulting, and I had plenty of work to launch my business.

What are the services that your clients need? Please describe a job you did.

Information Edge specializes in the following areas:

  • Knowledge Services/Enterprise Content Management: providing solutions to organize intellectual content to make it findable, actionable and reusable.
  • Library Automation: making externally published content findable by reviewing the library collection and organizational needs to recommend the best solution to automate access to library materials to save staff time and frustration.
  • Proprietary Database Research: expert searching of millions of resources on hundreds of proprietary databases not available on the open Web. Information Edge then provides value-added analysis of content found, an executive summary report so the client does not have to comb through thousands of citations. This provides a complete research department at the clients’ fingertips when they need it.

It’s difficult to choose one job to share, but this one had lots of interesting elements to it… I was brought in as a consultant for a global architectural firm to assess their current information needs and recommend the best print/electronic software solution to maximize staff efficiency and ease of use. The client has six print and many digital library collections in each of its six offices. (There were many information silos and it was impossible for staff to find what they needed.) They wanted to be able to share, search and retrieve image and file information using an online database. They have an intranet and are using digital assets management software to manage 30,000 digital images. An inventory was needed because they didn’t know what they had in each of the physical nor digital libraries.

Information Edge (IE) performed an information audit to determine how staff find information and to ascertain where the pain points were. IE then researched and recommended software solutions and a taxonomy that would maximize ROI for finding information needed by staff to do their work. IE also recommended ongoing staffing needs to keep the system current and assisted with hiring a librarian.

As an independent consultant, what is the most important thing you are doing to stay competitive?
I try to keep my name and services in front of clients and colleagues (who often recommend my services to others or hire me). I do this by writing in the information professional and target market literature, presenting at conferences and seminars, and networking. I also stay in touch with clients by sending them unsolicited articles or information I think would be of use to them (though I do this only occasionally). I also have a new blog that I hope will provide useful information to my current and potential clients as well as colleagues.

What is your favorite (or most productive) tool you use in your work?
There are so many Web 2.0 tools that I could mention, such as LinkedIn, but a handy little tool I use when working on client projects is called TraxTime. It helps me keep track of the time I spend on projects and with clients. Those 10-15 minute phone calls and emails really do add up and if I didn’t have this tool, it would be difficult to track that time.

What has been your most memorable work experience?

Fourth Ward School

Fourth Ward School

There have been lots of them. One that I think is unique comes from my time at the Nevada State Library as the Collection Development Librarian. The State Librarian’s office had received a phone call from the Virginia City School District about some books that were in the long abandoned Fourth Ward School, a beautiful structure built in the heyday of the silver rush. It fell to the Public Services Librarian and me to go inspect the building and see what was there. We were both charmed by the beautiful building while at the same time appalled at its horrible condition. Bird and rat droppings were everywhere, but vestiges of the old beautiful schoolhouse were still visible — blackboards with the letters of the alphabet over each one, a few very old desks and worn, but lovely wooden floors. The books were not much to look at but we had a wonderful time seeing this historic old building. It has now been restored.

Why do you volunteer for BayNet and other professional associations?
When I first started in this profession, I found so many mentors who freely spent time answering my questions and helping me to stretch professionally. In turn, I want to give back to other information professionals. A really good way to do that is to volunteer either in a formal capacity (board or committee member or chair) or informally as colleagues and students contact me for advice. Many of my colleagues whom I have met through my involvement with professional associations have become good friends.

Also posted in East Bay |

PROFILE: Sharon Miller and the Mechanics’ Institute

By BayNet | Published: October 12, 2009

Located in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, the Mechanics’ Institute is a nonprofit membership organization open to the public. Founded just after the Gold Rush to provide technical education and training for mechanics and to promote local and California industry, the Institute today is a vibrant intellectual and cultural center serving the entire Bay Area.

Mechanics’ Institute, by rockcreek.

Housed in an one hundred year-old landmark building on Post Street, the Institute serves its members with a large general-interest circulating and research library, offering book discussion groups, writers’ groups, and Internet research classes; the oldest chess club in the United States with activities for players of all abilities from beginners to grand masters; and an active program of literary and cultural events, including author programs, film series, salons, special events and art exhibitions. Source: Mechanics’ Institute.

BayNet speaks with Sharon Miller who is the Institute’s acting library director and BayNet’s newest Treasurer.

What is one thing your library is very good at? Personalized customer service. We take pride in meeting our members’ information needs.

Is there something else about your library that most people do not know? We are a full-spectrum library, no longer training men in the mechanical arts.

Who are your most frequent types of users? We have no one category, but daily see students, retirees, workers from surrounding retail and businesses, and children who are chess players.

What do you like best about your users? They all like our library!

Sharon Miller

Sharon Miller

As a library director, what are your primary responsibilities? I manage the budget and the personnel, oversee several book groups and writers’ groups, teach classes, give tours, and promote new projects. We are busy with technology upgrades and marketing ideas, and am always looking for ways to make our facilities more useful for our library users, so I enjoy talking with people. I love listening to the ideas presented by our enthusiastic members!

What is it about your job that most people don’t realize that you do? Fix photocopier problems.

What initially attracted you to library work? I wanted to spend my days in a library.  My family were enthusiastic public library users from my infancy.

What do you like most about working in your library? Our book discussion groups are fun, entertaining, and usually a wonderful learning experience for all of us.

What is most challenging about working in your library? Convincing people the Google is not always the best place to find information.

What accomplishment at work are you most proud of? Teaching people who have never used a computer how to do so, and seeing them successfully using email and other computer applications.

What is the most memorable experience you had at work? One of my everyday joys on the job is the physical place where I work: an historical building that is both charming and majestic. It is a delight to walk in every morning.

What is your favorite way to spend time off? My husband and I spend our weekends walking all over the city: doing errands (we have no car), seeing the sights, and enjoying this terrific place.

What do you think will be the biggest change in libraries and information services in the future? Changing the way reference librarians have traditionally interacted with people: rather than waiting for people to come to us, we will be finding ways to “push” information out. Libraries will be less of a “place” — although that will always be one part of who we are — and more of a service.

Also posted in San Francisco | Tagged |