Ex Libris’s James Steenbergen Dies

Ex Libris veteran James Steenbergen died from a massive heart attack February 6 at age 57. He was one of the first staffers to join the company’s new Ex Libris USA office in Illinois in 1998 as director of ALEPH Support Services. In that post, Steenbergen was instrumental in creating a support team for the company’s North American customers. A veteran of both the automation and library fields, Steenbergen worked in various capacities for NOTIS Systems and Ameritech, after serving as the assistant director of the Riverdale Public Library District, IL.

“James was ever-conscious of the strong relationship that develops between a customer and the implementation team and wanted to assure customers personally that the support organization cared and was there to do the best possible job of representing customers’ issues and concerns,” said Ex Libris president Dan Trajman.

Carl Grant, a friend and colleague who worked with Steenbergen at Ex Libris, said, “James believed in libraries and spent a lot of his life trying to enable automation to provide better service for the users of libraries. It showed.”