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Confessions of a reference librarian

Ever wonder exactly what kind of work members of RUSA do, or maybe which courses they would recommend for students looking for a career in reference or user services? On October 28, RUSA will begin to run a series of week-long interviews with a different member each week.

Hosted on ALA Connect at the IAmRUSA Community – http://connect.ala.org/node/211629 ALA members will be given the opportunity to ask questions of participating RUSA members about their professional careers, their passions, and anything else that may come up involving librarianship.

Be sure to join in the community and if you are interested in participating as an interviewee, contact Kirk MacLeod at kgmcleod@ualberta.ca or Sarah Hammill at hammills@fiu.edu for more information.

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How is BRASS like the Oscars?

Call for Nominations – Gale Cengage Learning Award for Excellence in Business Librarianship

(A message from award committee member, Bobray Bordelon)

Dear Colleagues,

For those of us in BRASS and/or the field of business librarianship—the Gale Cengage Learning Award for Excellence in Business Librarianship is like the BRASS Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars!  We honor an individual who has made significant contributions in the field business librarianship.

So please take a look around your professional life and reflect on what contribution to business librarianship has made an impact on your professional career.  Now is the time to honor this person for their important contribution with a nomination for this prestigious award. Our sponsor is Gale Cengage Learning.

The recipient will receive a $3000 cash award and a citation. The award and citation will be presented at the RUSA Awards ceremony at the 2014 ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas June 26-July 1, 2014!

Applicants for this award will be evaluated based on their contribution to the field of business librarianship. These contributions may include, but are not limited to: authorship of a seminal book or articles in business librarianship; development of an imaginative and successful program centered around business within a library; teaching business librarianship in a particularly creative and substantive manner; and displaying strong leadership in a professional association geared to business librarianship.

NOMINATIONS –

To submit a nomination, please download and complete the nomination form, and follow the submission instructions therein.  For more information, please visit the award page at http://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/businesslib.

Please email or mail the nomination packet by DECEMBER 15, 2013, to the Committee Chair, Mark E Andersen.

Mark E Andersen
Division Chief
Business Science Technology
Chicago Public Library
400 S. State Street, 4N-7A
Chicago, IL  60605
(p) 312.747.4470
-OR-
andersen@chipublib.org

(Drum roll)…  And the Oscar Gale Cengage Learning Award for Excellence in Business Librarianship goes to…stay tuned!

Remember, if you don’t nominate that significant contributor in our field, they can’t be considered for this award!

More information about these awards, including nominating instructions, can be found at the RUSA Awards Web page. Monetary award amounts are subject to change without notice and are contingent upon donor funding supplied at the time the award is presented. Questions about these awards should be directed to the committee chairperson or to Leighann Wood, RUSA awards program coordinator at lwood@ala.org.

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From flight attendant to librarian: Q&A with Louise Feldmann, RUSA Director-at-Large

Over the next several weeks we will be highlighting members of RUSA’s Board of Directors. Take a minute and get to know our fantastic leaders!

Meet Louise, RUSA Director-at-Large. Not only is she business savvy, but she can deliver a baby at 35,000 feet! Want to chat about all things RUSA with Louise? You can reach her at the email at the end of this post.

Louise Feldmann
Louise Feldmann

Louise Feldmann
Business Librarian
Colorado State University

What are you currently reading or listening to?
Currently, I’m working my way through the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (so excited that a television series based on these novels is in the works!).  I just finished Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.  My reading interests are all over the place.  I love just browsing through our library’s literature collection and discovering gems!

What is the most interesting “reference” question you’ve ever been asked? (reference in quotes to allow for some flexibility in answering the question)
I’m a business librarian, so I get my fair share of “interesting” questions, from worm composting to motorcycle ownership in Pakistan.  I love a good, juicy reference question.  I can’t say I have one question that stands out; they have all been interesting!

Tell us about your current role at your library, and maybe a little bit about your career path, too.
I do the business subject stuff at Colorado State University Libraries – reference, instruction, and collection development.  I’ve been at Colorado State University for eight years.  Prior to coming to Fort Collins, I worked as a substitute adult reference librarian at Mountain View Public Library in California.

Describe a particularly rewarding experience in your library career.
Helping students is the most rewarding part of my job.  A few years ago, I assisted a team of business students with in-depth research on a company for a competition and they won!  They sent me a wonderful thank you letter.  It was great.  Thank you letters from students are fantastic.  I had one student tell me that I was like a rock star in the College of Business.  Brilliant!

Give one fun fact about yourself—can be personal or professional.
I was a flight attendant for 12 years and based in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Honolulu.  I have received training in how to deliver a baby at 35,000 feet!

Any hobbies?
I love to ski and travel.  I dabble in other things such as knitting, yoga, and painting.  Mostly these days, I drive my teen boys around to various activities!

Why did you join RUSA (and/or sections)?
I discovered RUSA when I started my academic librarian career.  I got involved in BRASS and through that discovered RUSA.

How has RUSA helped you in your career?
RUSA has helped me tremendously in my career, particularly via my participation in BRASS.  I’ve learned tons from colleagues across the country.  RUSA has provided invaluable learning and networking opportunities.

What are some of the RUSA activities you’ve participated in?
Most of my RUSA activities have been via BRASS.  I’ve chaired the discussion group and membership committee and served on the education and publication committees.  This past year I chaired the BRASS 25th anniversary party.

If you’re open to having RUSA members connecting with you directly, provide an e-mail address and/or phone number where they can reach you.
Absolutely!  Louise.Feldmann@Colostate.edu; 970-491-4262

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Never read Harry Potter and other confessions from RUSA Director-at-Large

Over the next several weeks we will be highlighting members of RUSA’s Board of Directors. Take a minute and get to know our fantastic leaders!

Meet Celia,  RUSA Director-at-Large.  She’s a fun, business-loving, Michigander librarian with lots to share! Want to connect with Celia? You may reach her at her email address listed at the end of this post.

Celia Ross
Business Reference Librarian
University of Michigan
Ross School of Business

Celia Ross
Celia Ross

What are you currently reading or listening to?
I’m kind of addicted to mysteries and I tend to have at least one each of audio and print book going at a time.  I just started listening to The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (recently revealed to be a pen name of J. K. Rowling [by the way, I live in constant fear that my librarian license will be revoked as I have never read any of the Harry Potter series–oops, did I just admit that in front of all of ALA?!]) and I just finished a great French noir debut called Summertime, All The Cats Are Bored by Philippe Georget as well as Where’d you go, Bernadette by Maria Semple.  Non-mystery audiobooks I have listened to relatively recently include Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed and Rob Lowe’s memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends (glad I went with the audiobook here as Lowe does the narrating himself–so good!).

What is the most interesting “reference” question you’ve ever been asked? (reference in quotes to allow for some flexibility in answering the questions) I once helped a student asking for information on how many schools there were in Chicago.  This was before readily-available data online, so I walked him over to the Education reference area, discussing how we might approach the question and how he would need to define what he meant by schools–did he want to include colleges & universities?  Public schools only?  Private schools?  He smiled and nodded for a while and we were getting some good leads on potential sources of school data when he said, “Actually, I asked ‘How many *squirrels* are in Chicago?”  I think we ended up identifying some animal-related groups in Chicago and discussed how he might need to get some estimates and then extrapolate.

Tell us about your current role at your library, and maybe a little bit about your career path, too.
I am lucky to be able to do what I love to do, which is to help connect people to the information they’re looking for and to sometimes teach them a research trick or two along the way.  I never thought I’d end up as a business reference specialist, but somehow here I am.  I work mostly with MBA students, but also with undergrads and faculty.  The topics tend to be business-focused, but the range of what constitutes “business” varies widely and wildly.  From food trucks to geothermal furnaces to cardiac stents to green consumers to mouth guards to smartphone apps and everything in  between, it’s always something new.

Describe a particularly rewarding experience in your library career.
Being elected Chair of BRASS was an honor.  I have met so many great people through BRASS and it’s a fantastic group to be involved with.  As a Past Chair of BRASS, and Past Past Chair, etc., as the years progress, you get appointed automatically to chair other BRASS committees (Nominating, Vendor Relations, some other ones that I’m forgetting), so we joke that we should get BRASS 4LIFE tattooed on our knuckles as part of our Chair initiation.

Give one fun fact about yourself—can be personal or professional.
I used to work at an all-boys summer camp in New Hampshire.  I started out in the kitchen but one summer they needed someone to take over the leatherworking shack–a former camper showed me how to bevel and stamp and for a brief while I was known as “the Leather Lady.”

Any hobbies?
Running, chia-pet collecting, kid-wrangling (I have two daughters, ages 5 and 2.5).

Why did you join RUSA (and/or sections)?
RUSA was initially my gateway to BRASS and I joined to expand my network of colleagues and to find a way to get involved with ALA.

How has RUSA helped you in your career?
It was through RUSA that I found my ALA home in BRASS.  RUSA also gave me the opportunity to turn what I used to run as a two-hour face-to-face workshop into a 4-week online course called Business Reference 101.  This, in turn, inspired and became the foundation for my ALA Editions-published Making Sense of Business Reference book which I *finally* finished last fall.  BizRef 101 is in its seventh or eighth year now (I’ve lost track) and here’s a shameless plug for Making Sense: www.facebook.com/MakingSenseBizRef

What are some of the RUSA activities you’ve participated in?
Lots and lots of BRASS stuff, RUSA Board, RUSA Membership Reception, RUSA Online Professional Development.

If you’re open to having RUSA members connecting with you directly, provide an e-mail address and/or phone number where they can reach you.
Sure–I’m happy to chat about RUSA with anyone.  Email is best: caross@umich.edu