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Technology In Libraries
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On September 9, 2004 librarianship lost a true champion. Anne Grodzins Lipow was unique – of all the testimonials I’ve read about her that is one undeniable truth. We each knew a different set of Anne’s qualities, or engaged with her in a different way, but in the end it all came down to the fact that Anne was someone we could all say was “larger than life”.
The days after her passing were filled with personal testimonials that were mostly lodged as comments on the Infopeople blog. It was an odd experience for me to read these messages and realize that as much as I felt that I knew her, I barely knew her at all. I was like the proverbial blind man with his hands wrapped around one part of the elephant, while others had a firm grip on other body parts and would describe a very different animal. My reality, as deeply felt as it was, was only a pale shadow of the whole.
But for all that, it was a long, long shadow. As a newly-minted librarian at UC Berkeley in the second half of the 1980s, I knew Anne as the person who led the outreach and instructional efforts of the library. Before long, she saw in me the potential to be a good teacher, despite my fear of public speaking, so she pulled me into her program and began teaching me everything she knew about speaking, putting on workshops, making handouts, etc. Under her tutelage, I taught classes such as dialup access to the library catalog, when 300bps modems were still common.
As the Internet began making inroads into universities, Anne was there with newly developed workshops on how to use it. She was convinced very early on, as was I, that the Internet would be an essential technology for libraries. This led to her approaching my colleague John Ober (then on faculty at the library school at Berkeley) and I about doing a full-day Internet workshop scheduled to coincide with the 1992 ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco. Using a metaphor of John's, we called it "Crossing the Internet Threshold"
Roy Tennant - Personal Name
1st Edtion
978-0-6152-1212-8
NONE
Technology In Libraries
Management
English
2008
1-125
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