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Tim Skeers, BOTM for October, 2006

Tim Skeers from the New Mexico State Library is out blogger of the month for October, 2006. Here’s his bio in his own words:

My interest in government publications was first sparked as an undergrad at Drake University when I took a research writing class. The professor had a more-than-average interest in them as research materials herself, and she made sure to include several exercises using Drake’s depository materials. That meant I was already interested and had some exposure when I was investigating financial aid for library school at the University of Illinois and interviewed for (and got) an assistantship in the Government Documents Department there.

Librarians seem either to hate government publications or love ’em, and I found myself hooked into the latter group. I returned to Drake after library school as the serials librarian, but kept looking for documents positions. I was in the documents department at Northern Illinois for a while where I also got an M.S. in geography, followed by an odd sort of interregnum in my library career while I worked briefly at the Iowa Emergency Management Division in a GIS position and later as photo librarian and a writer for a gardening magazine. After a time at UNLV working with state and local gov pubs, I came here to the New Mexico State Library.

My focus here is on cataloging the New Mexico state agency publications for our state depository program and federal publications from regional offices that don’t make it into the FDLP but which are important to our community. Like everyone else, I’m concerned about how born-digital
material will be disseminated and preserved. Fortunately, we have the OCLC Digital Archive that we’re using to do that — talking a little about this will probably be on of my first guest blogs.

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