Category Archives: biography

Starr Hoffman is Librarian for Digital Collections at the University of North Texas Libraries. She is responsible for maintaining UNT's Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports Archive and the CyberCemetery, a NARA-affiliated archive of defunct government websites, and is also the Web Administrator for ALA GODORT. Starr received her Master of Library Science and Master of Art History from the University of North Texas, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Higher Education. Her research interests include web archiving, distance learning, digital collections, library marketing, and graphic novels. She also writes the Geeky Artist Librarian blog… and it’s rumored that sometimes she finds the time to sleep. Continue reading →

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J. Paul Lomio is library director and lecturer at law at Stanford Law School. Paul hates paying for government information twice -- once as a taxpayer, and then again as a library director forced to purchase government produced information. Paul has graduate degrees in law from Gonzaga Law School and the University of Washington and a masters of library and information science from the Catholic University of America. Paul was admitted to the Washington State Bar. He is the author (with Henrik Spang-Hanssen) of Legal Research Methods in the U.S. and Europe (DJOF 2008). Brian Provenzale has been a librarian for a few years (at UCLA and currently at Stanford) and a Web nerd for over ten. He thinks every U.S. citizen should, with minimal effort, be able to find out what the government is doing at all times. Sergio Stone. Sergio is Stanford's first Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian. Erika V. Wayne is deputy library director and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. Along with George Wilson, Kate Wilko and Paul Lomio, Erika Wayne has co-taught Advanced Legal Research for 3 years. Erika's interest in Open Access dates back to the 1996 when she helped in the development of the Securities Class Action Clearinghouse -- the first court designated internet site for public posting of securities litigation filings. And, she hates to pay for *anything* that should be free. She has a JD from Penn, an AB from Duke and a MS from Illinois in Library and Information Science. Kate Wilko is a Reference Librarian and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. This Spring marks the sixth time she has team-taught Advanced Legal Research. Within the legal research world and its limited publisher options, open access is quickly becoming a topic of more urgent importance. Kate is very pleased to be able to share thoughts and ideas with other open access community members on freegovinfo.info George Wilson is a reference librarian at Stanford's law library. He started working there in late 2005, after having spent seven years in corporate law practice in Washington, DC and San Francisco, as well as around a decade as a researcher and administrator in various Stanford departments. He has a JD from Georgetown, a BA from UC Berkeley, and will receive his MLIS degree from San Jose State in May 2008. Continue reading →

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Frank Lester is Electronic Services Librarian at the Institute of Governmental Studies Library at the University of California at Berkeley, a collection specializing in non-trade materials, ephemera, serials, and mongraphs relating to California and federal politics, public policy, and public administration. He is also the Institute of Governmental Studies webmaster and is on a rotating 2-year assignment as the webmaster of the Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC), ending in the fall of 2008. Previous to IGS, he was an assistant government documents librarian at the University of Michigan, staff assistant at the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan, and a reference administrator at the Internet Public Library. Prior to his career as a librarian, Lester was a member of the campaign finance staff at the San Francisco Ethics Commission for three years. Lester has published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and is the main contributor to the California Policy Inbox, a regularly updated blog highlighting recently-published California government agency and non-profit organization public policy documents and current California public policy news developments. Lester's main interests are national, state, and local politics, the role of developing technologies in increasing public access to and interest in government documents, and the intersection between the digital and the traditional library realms. Continue reading →

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Rebecca Blakeley is head of the Government Documents Department at the McNeese State University Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She was selected to be a 2008 American Library Association Emerging Leader. Prior to McNeese, Rebecca worked in the Reference and Government Publications departments at the University of Rhode Island and also taught courses on Information Literacy. She received her M.L.I.S. in 2005 and her B.A. in Anthropology in 2003, both from the University of Rhode Island. Rebecca fell in love with Government Documents when she took an online course with Daniel O'Mahony, whose passion for "Documents to the People" inspired her to become a documents librarian. Rebecca is a techie wannabee and is neither Gen X nor Gen Y but somewhere in between. Feel free to visit her department's blog, Gov Docs on the Bayou. Continue reading →

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Susanna Leers says...

I'm the E-research & Technology Services Librarian at Barco Law Library, University of Pittsburgh School of Law. I've been working here for 5 years. I got my BA at Columbia University in New York, and my MLIS and MSL (Master of Studies in Law) at the University of Pittsburgh. In my position as an academic law librarian I serve both law school patrons and public patrons who are permitted to use our library for legal research and for access to our Government Documents collection. I also purchase and manage all our law database subscriptions - whose use is usually restricted, per our license agreements, to law school faculty and students. So I am keenly aware of the government information that is freely available and the government information that is not. I would like our public patrons to be able to easily access the same government information that we can pull up so easily in licensed databases. Because, as you say so eloquently in the blog, "While governments will continue to fulfill their role of creating and disseminating information, there is another continuing essential role for preserving and organizing that information for users and providing long-term access to and service for that information."

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