The Desk Set

Amber Billey (guest blogger, December 2009 & March 2010) received her MLIS from Pratt Institute with certificates in Archives and Museum Librarianship. At Pratt, she focused on metadata standards, cataloging, and digital libraries for cultural heritage institutions. She currently works as the metadata specialist and content strategist for Whirl-i-gig, the software firm behind the design of CollectiveAccess an open-source collection management system for museums, archives and historical societies. Billey is also the Co-President for Friends of the Greenpoint Branch Brooklyn Public Library, and she has cataloged every millipede known man. (photograph by Tara White)

Lisa Goldstein (guest blogger, November 2009) has been working as a young adult librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library for almost seven years.  She currently coordinates teen services for six branches in East New York and Brownsville.

Matt Haugen (Guest Blogger, February 2010) is the Catalog Librarian and Systems Assistant at the New York Society Library. He received his MLS from the Palmer School in January 2010, along with a certificate in Archives Management and a concentration in Rare Books and Special Collections. In 2007, he received his Master of Arts in Religion from Yale, where he also worked as a manuscript processor at the Beinecke Library. Matt received his BA in Classical Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN, and was a frequent user of the public library in his hometown in northern Minnesota. His professional interests include: using digital collections and exhibits to increase access to rare books, manuscripts, and historical source materials; issues of religion, cultural heritage, and censorship in libraries; and social networking. His reading interests include cultural studies, feminist theology, and historical fiction, and he has also recently begun exploring the science fiction and fantasy genres. Outside of the library, he enjoys baking and vegetarian cooking, swimming, board and video games, and live music.

Robin M. Katz (Guest Blogger, April 2010) is the Digital Initiatives Outreach Librarian at the University of Vermont Libraries’ Center for the Digital Initiatives (CDI), a digital library of unique research collections available online at http://cdi.uvm.edu.  She graduated from Kent State SLIS in 2009 with a concentration in Special Collections and Archives.  Previously, she has worked with librarians at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Dorothy Lazard (Guest Blogger, May 2010) is a reference librarian at Oakland Public Library’s Main branch where she manages the history, architecture, map and travel collections, and the Oakland History Room. She earned her MLIS degree  from University of California at Berkeley where she worked for many years running the Women’s Studies and Counseling Center libraries. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College in Baltimore, and has had essays published in several literary journals and anthologies.

Chris Maisano (Guest Blogger, September 2009) is a Young Adult Librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. In 2008 he earned his Master of Science in Library and Information Science from Drexel University in Philadelphia, and in 2000 he earned undergraduate degrees in History and Poltical Science from Rutgers University. When he’s not at work, Chris spends his time engaging in political activism, reading, listening to music and going to shows, plowing his way through his Netflix queue, and dealing with the psychological trauma that comes with being a fan of both the Rangers and Mets.

Holly Morganelli graduated from Pratt with a MILS in 2009, and has worked for Brooklyn Public Library as a PULSE Librarian Trainee and Lubuto Library Project in Lusaka, Zambia after receiving a fellowship for international librarianship. She also worked as a cataloging librarian for a Latin American book distributor in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a position she left when she was hired as the head of the art library for Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar. The museum is set to open in December 2010, and she has been developing all aspects of the library and library services in preparation for the opening date.

Abby Moynahan (Guest Blogger, July 2010) is currently a Library Media Specialist for the Schenectady County, N.Y. School District. Abby works in two kindergarten through sixth grade elementary schools. She received her Masters in Library Science from Pratt Institute in 2009. When Abby is not teaching she enjoys cooking and working in her garden.

Sarah Murphy (Desk Set co-founder) is a school librarian in Manhattan and works with students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Sarah has a Masters in Library and Information Science from the Palmer School, where she concentrated in Rare Books and Special Collections, and she has previously worked at the New York Society Library and in the Rare Book Room at the New York Academy of Medicine. Sarah also works occasionally in classical theatre, and she co-founded the Bakerloo Theatre Project in 2000. She and Maria Falgoust founded the Desk Set in 2006.

Katie Nachod (Guest Blogger, August 2010) was born in Philadelphia to a Yankee father with Czech roots but a Southern (from Mississippi) mother who was half Irish and half English. She moved to New Orleans when she was nine, and lived there most of her life, except for a year at Beloit College in Wisconsin and two years at Drexel University back in Philly for her M.L.S. After getting her undergraduate degree in English Literature at the University of New Orleans, she decided to get a job for a year and save some money for English graduate school.  As Robert Burns said, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. Since her mother was a librarian at the New Orleans Public Library, that seemed a  likely place to apply, and she was hired as a library assistant in the Children’s Department of the main library. She enjoyed the work so much that she stayed almost three years and ending up going to library school instead of English graduate school. She returned to New Orleans for her first professional job, as a Business & Science Librarian back at the New Orleans Public Library. After the first year, she was given the added position of Government Documents Librarian, the beginning of a several decades long love affair with legislative, judicial, and regulatory reports and publications. Her next two positions were as the Government Documents/Microforms Librarian at Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University and then at Tulane Law Library. She stayed in the latter job for nineteen years, thoroughly enjoying academic legal research. Then after losing her home to the floodwaters following Katrina, she made a job change as well, and for the past three and a half years has been the Reference/Electronic Resources at the Law Library of Louisiana, the only public law library in the state, part of the Louisiana Supreme Court. After starting out a  public library some thirty years ago, she has made a full circle back to another type of public library. She is a voracious and eclectic reader, her latest finds being two older titles, The Alchemist by Paul Coelho and The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. She is also a movie buff, and just saw Things We Lost in the Fire, starring Halle Berry, David Duchovny, and Benicio de Toro and an amazing documentary about the Barnes Collection in suburban Philadelphia (but not for long) entitled The Art of the Steal. For music, her abiding favorite is Leonard Cohen, but she listens to jazz (especially Gypsy jazz – she has a dog named Gypsy and one named Django, after Django Reinhardt), and old favorites like Nina Simone, Judy Collins, Loreena McKennitt, The Neville Brothers, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, Michael Franks, and John Prine, just to name a few.

Emily L. Nichols (Guest Blogger, January 2010) is the Head of Children’s Services at the Beverly Public Library in Beverly, MA.  Before relocating to the New England seaside she was manager of school age children’s programs for five branches of the Brooklyn Public Library.  Emily received her M.L.S. from Queens College and holds a B.A. from Smith College in History and Archaeology.  You can find her poetry, reviews, photos, and non-library ideas at http://emilynichols.net/