About me
I was born a-nd raised in Long Beach, California. My parents were both academics, so I grew up surrounded by books. In fact, one of my chores as a kid was to help my mom (a historian) keep track of her collection of medieval history books and journals. So I guess I started out on the path to becoming a cataloger way back then, unwittingly. But it wasn't until many years later that I actually started working in a library.
Actually, I got my first library job completely by accident. I was living in the old Divinity Hall at Harvard, studying for a master's degree and living on a diet that consisted mainly of Top Ramen and ketchup packets... I was broke! I had applied for student jobs all over campus but hadn't had any luck in landing one. Then one day my phone rang, and it was somebody from one of Harvard's libraries... they were calling a different person to find out if they were interested in an interview for a part-time job... and had dialed the wrong number. Luckily I had the presence of mind to say that, while I wasn't the person they were looking for, I was interested in a job, so maybe I could come in for an interview as well. I guess I was lucky, because I ended up getting the job.
It was at Tozzer Library, which is one of Harvard's great libraries. I loved it there because the collection – focussed on anthropology and archaeology – was endlessly interesting. The job, shelving books, not so much. But I stuck it out, and after a year of shelving books I had earned enough trust with the people there that I was able to move on to more interesting work.
I continued to work at various Harvard libraries as a student. When my stay as a grad student at Harvard came to a somewhat abrupt end, I discovered that library work, and in particular technical services, was (unlike the "pure" academic path I had been following) something I was both good at and interested in. So, after a brief stint at Harvard's Preservation Center, I took a full-time job at MIT as a serials copy cataloger.
After a couple of years here at MIT, I decided to get a degree in library science. I attended McGill University's School of Information Studies from the autumn of 2006 to the spring of 2008. Luckily for me, as I was studying hard (or, as the case sometimes was, hardly studying) in Montreal, the head of the Serials Cataloging Section at MIT had moved on to greener pastures. So I applied for the job, and fortune smiled upon me, because I got it.