News from WSU Vancouver Library

By Leslie Wykoff

The Campus Library at WSU Vancouver is small but mighty. We serve 1500 junior, senior, and graduate students and about 80 faculty members. We have six full time people and about twelve part time people working in the Library.

Dena Keller has worked for the WSU Vancouver Library the longest. Dena also worked for Jill Palmer in Pullman, while she was a student there. She was the ASWSUV vice-president here at Vancouver when she was a student assistant for the Library. This is what makes her at great at Circulation and Reserve, I think. She knows the customer very well. Dena supervises the student assistants who work at the circ desk and they are an excellent crew.

Kerry Hodge came to Vancouver from Owen four years ago. Kerry has worked for The Libraries for ten years. Kerry is a jack-of-all-trades, and we depend on her to help in many areas. She is our specialist in acquisitions and serials control. As you may all know, Kerry is great at computers, and joyously tackles the most challenging software obscurity. The next time I turn around she has it mastered. She recently learned how to build Access databases.

Linda Frederiksen is a librarian on a temporary appointment as the Access Services Librarian. Linda is managing the interlibrary loan and document delivery processes, plus doing reference hours. As a branch campus, this function is very important to us, as you can imagine. Linda is working on several projects to increase electronic access to fulltext sources, and to make requesting ILL materials less cumbersome.

Nicole Campbell is one of our faculty librarians. Her main responsibility to provide reference service, but she also does much of the systems work and is the library's webmaster. Her subject specialties are the sciences and engineering, and English. Isn't that great? Nicole works a lot with Karen Diller on making sure all our databases are accessible to our students who like to use them from their workplaces and homes. Nicole and Karen (and Janet Chisman) are going to London to give a paper on The WSU Libraries research on the usability of library websites.

Karen Diller is my right hand. She manages reference and user education. Dena works with Karen on circ and reserve issues. Karen is one of the finest teachers I have ever met. It is obvious that she loves it. We are teaching a class together again this semester called "Electronic Research and the Rhetoric of Information." Karen creates many programs and workshops for faculty and students at WSUV on using appropriate information and educational technologies in their research and instruction.

The Library is part of a division called Vancouver Information Services (VIS). VIS includes Vancouver Information Technology (VIT) and Vancouver WHETS and the Campus Library. We have all been in this division since 1995, so we're pretty used to it. We all work together on projects, and we party together on birthdays and holidays. In this small campus environment it is easy to know people from different departments very well.

I am the campus librarian and the director of VIS. My job is really interesting, I think. While I spend a lot of time on IT issues, my office is in the library, so I'm still close to and involved in daily library operations. I used to be a super public services person, but now I've become focused on how to build a really, really good "core" collection at a branch campus. So, now my new big interest is collection development.

We all would love it if, when you over on the West Side, you would come visiting our library and campus. We want to get to know all of you better.