People

Kimber L. Fender retired as director of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County,  Sue Landers has been named the next Executive Director of Lambda Literary, and more people news from the July 2018 issue of Library Journal.

A photo spurred Marian Fragola to create the Making Space series at North Carolina State University (NCSU). As part of a study on the library’s gaming spaces, a student snapped a picture of herself looking into one of the rooms, her body reflected in the glass. “[It] captured her feelings of not being welcomed,” says Fragola, director of program planning and outreach. The photo brought home to Fragola and her colleagues the issue of women’s underrepresentation in the Maker movement and tech.

As director of archives and special collections at Columbia University’s Barnard Library, Shannon O’Neill practices “radical empathy,” both in the materials she selects and in the way she interacts with colleagues. The concept of radical empathy in archival practice comes from Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” explains O’Neill. In practice, she says, “we allow ourselves to be open to and affected by one another, and we acknowledge and actively confront oppressive structures—ones that are colonial, carceral, and racist—in archives.”

In a 2015 journal article for Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, Reed College Library’s Annie Downey and Joe Márquez defined service design as “a holistic, cocreative, and user-centered approach to understanding customer behavior for the creation or refining of services.” They laid out a flexible, user-centered approach to understanding user and service provider experiences using qualitative tools—and then creating holistic solutions.

Voting for the American Library Association (ALA) 2019–20 presidential campaign opened on March 12, and ALA members in good standing can cast their ballots through April 4. Results will be announced April 11. LJ invited the candidates to weigh in on some key issues pertaining to ALA and librarianship; more information can be found on ALA’s Election Information page.

The University of Oklahoma (OU) Libraries are lucky enough to own all 12 of Galileo’s first editions, four of which contain the author’s own handwriting. They’re also fortunate to have as part of their team Twila Camp, whom the libraries’ associate dean of knowledge services and CTO Carl Grant calls a “talented collaborator, out-of-the-box thinker, and lifelong learner/librarian.” Camp, OU libraries director of web services, leads the technical team that helped create 2015’s Galileo’s World, a series of 20 exhibits at seven locations on three OU campuses.

Jennifer Ferretti has been a digital librarian for more than ten years at various institutions. A fine arts graduate from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), she returned to MICA in 2015 to lead digital initiatives. “I never wanted to be a librarian,” says Ferretti, because “I didn’t know what librarians did. I never had a librarian I connected to and never met a Latinx librarian.” A supportive internship supervisor at the Smithsonian (2007–08) and a strong community on “librarian Twitter” changed that.

“In middle school,” says Kristina Spurgin, “I taught myself to code in BASIC and repurposed the Address Book application that came with our Tandy Radio Shack 1000 EX to subject index my parents’ National Geographic collection—for fun. Now I have a spreadsheet that tells me when to start making bread, given the time I want to eat the bread and whether it’s chilly, neutral, or warm inside.” Unsurprisingly, Spurgin is meticulous in describing how initiatives she leads on the job improve upon existing processes and enable work that was previously impossible.

After the 2016 presidential election, Graduate Fellows from the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities came to the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library to consult Laurie Allen, the director for digital scholarship. They feared environmental and climate data on government websites would disappear under the new administration. What could they do?