Straddling Borders: Lorely Ambriz

Lorely Ambriz wanted to be a librarian so much that she chose it over her journalism career at Univision, where she was a news assignments editor/producer and weekend health reporter and had won awards for her work on newscast production.

Why did librarianship appeal to a woman who had never even been in a library when she came here from Mexico 11 years ago? Ambriz says her student job at her community college library showed her that broadcasting and librarianship aren't that different. Both involve information research, analysis, organization, communication, and writing. But libraries allow her to serve and teach people face to face, whereas “in television, it is hard to ask whether people's needs are met with your service,” she says.

Now, as librarian for the Pan American Health Organization, Ambriz knows she's meeting important public health needs: doing research; writing reports, manuals, and training materials in both Spanish and English; and marketing the library's services at several conferences a month. “I can serve my two countries and in both languages,” she says.

A primary responsibility was creating the Border Virtual Health Library web site, which her supervisor, Maria Teresa Cerqueira, calls a best practices model “for information dissemination and exchange among the many stakeholders in public health along the border.” Young though Ambriz is, she has already used the skills of two professions to serve the people of two nations.