I’m the coordinator of the distance masters’ degree program at UW-Madison School of Library & Info Studies (SLIS). In 2013, due to retirements, I became the person who’d been with the School the longest. I’m also almost the oldest person there – but Dave in the office has me beat by a few months. I teach courses on cataloging, organization of information, new technology for librarians, and online searching. Sometimes I teach website design & usability, or photograph archives. Since my background is in visual materials, I am very interested in the digitization of library and museum collections, and online picture databases, and have taught workshops on these topics as well. I also have taught cooking classes and art classes, and done catering, and hope to do a lot more of that after I retire from being a librarian.
I began working at SLIS in January, 2000. Before that I was with the Internet Scout Project, located in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Scout Project (among its many activities and good works) is the publisher of the Scout Report, a weekly electronic newsletter in continuous publication since 1994 [a.k.a. FOREVER in Internet time], that reviews and describes quality Web sites.
My job at the Scout project was cataloging Internet resources for the Scout Report Signpost, (now built into the Scout Report Archives) and writing weekly reviews for the Scout Report. The Scout Report Archives is a searchable database of all the short reviews, or annotations, written about new and newly discovered Internet sites published in the Scout Report since 1994. So if you can’t remember the date of the Scout Report where you read that description of a cool sounding site, try searching the SR Archives. I still review art, museum, and picture sites, as an emeritus Scout.
I have spent more time now as an instructor than as a librarian working with collections – but when I did, I worked more often with collections of pictures than books. I have been a photograph archivist and a picture researcher for a children’s book publisher. Nowadays I look at pictures on the Web much more often than on the wall. I studied art and art history in school, tried to make a living by making art, slowly realized that the food I made spoke to people better than the art, and worked as a cook for many years before I became a librarian.