This is not a resume. (My traditional resume is on LinkedIn.) This is a semi-narrative outline of what inspires me, the experiences I treasure, where I see myself headed.
Libraries have always been my second home. My first memory of a public library is walking with my mother to the Haskett Branch Library in Anaheim, California, through the neighboring Maxwell Park, and I’ve especially loved park-and-library combinations ever since.
I came home to library work in spring 2004, when I started as a volunteer at Spanish Peaks Library District in Walsenburg, Colorado, sorting donations and covering books. I’ve worked in every area of library operations except Children’s Services, and pitch in from time to time there; my core specialties are in technical services. I’ve become enthralled with systems librarianship in the last few years.
I am fascinated with the stuff in the margins, the way the pieces fit together, and how the shape and color of things change when filtered through each other. I am a pattern and process geek: a textile artist and weaver, an experimental cook and inept gardener, a voracious reader and an occasional poet, a crack troubleshooter and relentless researcher, an amateur historian andre-enactor, a social justice activist with a special passion for issues at the intersection of class, gender, and community.
I believe that we are more than the sum of our parts. I believe in elegance, in the idea that things that work on one level work on many levels and solutions that meaningfully benefit people with one set of problems also have a positive impact on the wider world. I believe that in looking deeply enough at things that don’t work, we go beyond pinpointing fixes to reveal possibilities. I believe that if I have one shot at saving the world, it’s through cataloging, meant in the broadest possible sense: creating, maintaining, improving, and sharing the tools that we use to make connection possible. Every connection – between a person and an idea, between an idea a thing to hold it, between a book or a film or a piece of art and a place, between a place and an opportunity, between an opportunity and a tool, between a tool and a person, but most of all between two people – every connection makes us all stronger.
Beth Harper 