Two Sundays ago a four-year student worker in Archives & Special Collections, Denton Baird ’14, graduated. Unfortunately I had to be out of town and didn’t get to attend. I had a long drive that weekend and was thinking about some of the contributions he made to our team prior to leaving on the great adventure that will be his post-graduation life. With the college’s current emphasis on meaningful student work, I hope that he found value in the work he did for us. We certainly found value in all he and other student workers have done. In Denton’s case his value extended from cheerfully doing the menial, like filing and moving boxes, to significant design and programming contributions on archives projects like Under Lake Norman, The Davidson Encyclopedia, and the Multicultural Center’s “Chances Are” Mural Resource Guide, to name a few. The nature of our projects is that rarely is an individual’s name associated with the result so it would be easy to forget the contributions made by individuals. This is worth remembering with regard to all of our student workers.
In thinking about our student workers it occurred to me that there are other, more permanent, members of the Discovery Systems team that make huge contributions on a daily basis but are perhaps a bit less visible than the rest of us. The two people that come to mind are Susan Kerr, our Systems Librarian, and Kim Sanderson, our Metadata Librarian. They both work hard every day making sure that basic and advanced functions of the library operate smoothly.
In Kim’s case, being the metadata librarian involves many aspects of making sure that items in our collection are discoverable. Among many other duties, Kim is responsible for creating catalog records for items purchased for the collection that don’t already have records (the hard stuff) and for doing quality control of all the records loaded into the catalog. Kim also provides consulting on how to organize metadata across a host of library projects, and provides guidance to the rest of the staff as we convert the collection from the Dewey to Library of Congress cataloging schemes. Next time you find something in Davidson Worldcat you can think of Kim and thank her for making sure it was cataloged correctly.
Susan has a variety of duties as the systems librarian. She is responsible for making sure that our vast collections of e-materials are represented in Davidson Worldcat and for coordinating with the vendor to make sure that problems with the system that is behind Worldcat (WMS) are resolved in a timely manner. In addition to those responsibilities Susan has made huge contributions in taking the very raw data that is available from WMS and manipulating it into usable format that the rest of the library staff can use to manage our business. Susan makes significant contributions to the library and archives websites as well as almost all of our web-based projects. Aside from those significant duties, Susan is responsible for installing and maintaining much of the special computer related equipment in the library including the microform scanners and the increasingly popular overhead book scanner. Susan is also the cheerful presence who helps both library staff and other library visitors with many PC related problems.
So, next time you interact with one of the more outward facing members of the library staff, remember Susan, Kim, and a large number of less visible library staff and student workers who make equally important contributions.
