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Meet Elizabeth Stregger: Systems Librarian, mad knitter, solver of problems

by Laura Landon on 2017-06-23T12:31:05-03:00 | 0 Comments

Elizabeth Stregger, Systems LibrarianSystems Librarian Elizabeth Stregger’s first foray into the world of data and systems was organizing information about potentially radioactive urine from workers at an Ontario nuclear power plant.

“My first big database was the database of pee,” she laughs. “I have quite an eclectic employment history.”

Stregger helped build the “database of pee” during one of her stints as an undergraduate summer student working for Ontario Power Generation and, before that, Atomic Energy Canada Limited. At the time, she was a physics student interested in radiation biology. But she wasn’t entirely happy.

“At some point, I realized I didn’t want to be working on one job in science for the rest of my life. I went to academic counselling and they suggested, among other things, libraries,” says Stregger, who noted that each of the suggested careers involved helping people get access to things they need. “I thought, ‘of course!’ That’s exactly what I want to be doing! I want to be helping people access information.”

Fast forward a decade, and she will be helping students, faculty and staff who use Mount Allison’s library do exactly that. In May 2017, Elizabeth Stregger joined the library on a term as Systems Librarian until July 2018. Her mission is to help the library assess its current Integrated Library System (ILS) – the massive computer system that makes everything in the library function – and to recommend a potentially new system. Her career path and that “eclectic employment history” position her well for the task at Mount A.

After earning undergraduate degrees in both physics and geoscience, Elizabeth engrossed herself in library work. Her first job after receiving a Library and Information Technology diploma from Red River College was in the University of Manitoba’s Health Sciences Library doing a variety of outreach work. It was the height of the H1N1 virus, and one of her jobs was to provide health care professionals and civil servants with up-to-date information about the virus – in other words, connecting people with the information they needed to provide care and make policy decisions. From there, she shifted to electronic resource management in another University of Manitoba library.

“There were always new problems to be solved. Sometimes disaster would strike and there’d be no access to something, and we would have to figure out how to get it up and running for students. That was an adrenaline rush!” says Elizabeth. But she still wanted to know more about why things failed.

Focus on 'why' leads to library career in data and systems

This focus on the “why” of problems led her away from her work as a library technician and into librarianship. “I loved learning about how things worked, but I always had questions about why. And that wasn’t the focus of the program,” she says of her Library Technician’s education. A Master of Library and Information Studies, on the other hand, could provide the librarian training and credentials she needed to tackle different problems and projects. Elizabeth completed her MLIS from London’s Western University in 2015 and went back to work in the University of Manitoba’s Health Sciences library. This time, she helped faculty and graduate students navigate the thorny world of research profiles, getting “a crash course in scholarly metrics” in the process.

Another term position at the University of Saskatchewan again involved data management and analysis, which morphed into a second term as a Discovery and Access Librarian.

“That’s exactly what I care about: making systems work better for students, decreasing barriers to access, making it easier for people to find and get the content they want,” she says.

This University of Saskatchewan work segues perfectly into the project at Mount Allison, where Elilzabeth is beginning to repeat many of the exercises she just completed at U Sask. These include conducting a wide range of interviews with staff and librarians to determine what people find good, bad and ugly about the current Integrated Library System. The end goal is to improve the system for students, staff and everyone who uses the library. That may mean a new system, or it may mean an upgrade to the current system, which has been coasting and at times limping along for years.

“One of the things I find interesting about the ILS is it’s such a core library system and we tend to implement it and forget it,” says Elizabeth, who advocates hands-on Systems Librarians who routinely talk to all users of the system and work on constant improvements.

Technology, she says, shouldn’t be driving people’s routines and decisions. Instead, library users’ needs should be driving technological changes and adaptations. Making that happen requires understanding why people – from students doing database searches to staff running statistical reports – use the library system the way they do.

 “The expertise is in understanding technology, but what you really need is communication skills and listening to people,” she says. “A Systems Librarian tries to make the system work well for library staff and library users, and that requires knowledge of librarians’ work and user needs, and in-depth knowledge of systems. There are things you can be doing to make it better for people who use it every day and who teach it to students.”

Patrons in the library might recognize Elizabeth as the librarian who wears the great, hand-knit sweaters. She has more than 100 hand-knit items, including sweaters, socks, shawls, and a cuddly mutant zombie squirrel of doom pouch.

Ever the problem-solver, she sums up her love of knitting this way: “I like the process of making clothes out of two sticks and strings.”


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