Anne Lipow (February 27, 1935 – September 9, 2004) was a prominent librarian who worked at the University of California, Berkeley Libraries. In 1992, she retired from Berkeley and started the Library Solutions Institute and Press. [1]
Anne Lipow (February 27, 1935 – September 9, 2004) was a prominent librarian who worked at the University of California, Berkeley Libraries. In 1992, she retired from Berkeley and started the Library Solutions Institute and Press. [1]
Lipow was born in Manchester, New Hampshire and was raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, the daughter of David Melvin Grodzins and his wife Taube Grodzins, Jewish emigrants, with roots in Poland and Grodno, Belarus. [2] Her brother is physicist Lee Grodzins, [3] and her sister, Ethel Grodzins Romm, was an author, project manager, CEO and co-chair of the Lyceum Society of the New York Academy of Sciences. [2] [4]
Lipow moved to Berkeley, California, from New York with her first husband Arthur Lipow in 1957 to attend graduate school. She received her MLS degree from UC Berkeley's Library School, graduating in 1960. She joined the staff of the UC Berkeley Library in 1961. In 1973 she created the BAKER document delivery service, which remains in service today. [5] In 1982 she was appointed Education Officer for the UC Berkeley Libraries. [6] In that role she developed a series of technology and library training courses for faculty, staff, and students. She retired as UC's library information officer in 1991 to start her own consulting service Library Solutions Institute. [7]
The first event that her newly founded Library Solutions Institute offered was a full-day of hands-on Internet training for librarians, in June 1992. [8] Scheduled to coincide with the annual conference of The American Library Association in San Francisco, it was held over two days in Berkeley, for two different cohorts of trainees. Spanning both groups of trainees was a reception and a talk by Clifford Lynch. This workshop required Anne and her colleagues John Ober and Roy Tennant to develop handouts describing various Internet protocols and services. The handouts were collected into a binder for workshop participants. Following the workshop, Lipow decided to publish the binder as a book. She changed the name of Library Solutions Institute to Library Solutions Institute and Press and published the book in the Fall of 1992 as Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook. [9] This was the same year that O'Reilly and Associates published "one of the first popular books about the Internet" (Wikipedia article).
Library Solutions Institute and Press went on to publish dozens of titles relating to libraries, technology, and new strategies for serving library clientele. Various workshops were also held around the world regarding these topics.
Anne Lipow and her colleagues created the first training materials on how to use the Internet for librarians. These materials were then used for workshops put on by the Library Solutions Institute and Press, UC Berkeley Extension, Infopeople (a California library training organization), and other professional organizations. Crossing the Internet Threshold was translated into Romanian, Bulgarian, and Turkish, and used in those countries to train librarians. It was also translated into Spanish and used widely in South America and elsewhere.
Her publications on the changing nature of reference work in libraries were very influential, and led to invited speaking engagements around the world. [10]
 | This section may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may interest only a particular audience.(May 2020) |
The reference desk or information desk of a library is a public service counter where professional librarians provide library users with direction to library materials, advice on library collections and services, and expertise on multiple kinds of information from multiple sources.
A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users.
Digital reference is a service by which a library reference service is conducted online, and the reference transaction is a computer-mediated communication. It is the remote, computer-mediated delivery of reference information provided by library professionals to users who cannot access or do not want face-to-face communication. Virtual reference service is most often an extension of a library's existing reference service program. The word "reference" in this context refers to the task of providing assistance to library users in finding information, answering questions, and otherwise fulfilling users’ information needs. Reference work often but not always involves using reference works, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc. This form of reference work expands reference services from the physical reference desk to a "virtual" reference desk where the patron could be writing from home, work or a variety of other locations.
The University of California operates the largest academic library system in the world. It manages more than 40.8 million print volumes in 100 libraries on ten campuses. The purpose of these libraries is to assist research and instruction on the University of California campuses. While each campus library is separate, they share facilities for storage, computerized indexing, digital libraries and management.
The Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library —also known as the Institute of Transportation Studies Library (ITSL), the Berkeley Transportation Library, or simply as the Transportation Library— is a transportation library at the University of California, Berkeley, devoted to transportation studies.
Joseph J. Romm is an American researcher, author, editor, physicist and climate expert, who advocates reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency and green energy technologies. Romm is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America", and Time magazine named him one of its "Heroes of the Environment (2009)", calling him "The Web's most influential climate-change blogger".
Henriette Davidson Avram was a computer programmer and systems analyst who developed the MARC format, the international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries. Avram's development of the MARC format in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the Library of Congress had a revolutionizing effect on the practice of librarianship, making possible the automation of many library functions and the sharing of bibliographic information electronically between libraries using pre-existing cataloging standards.
An academic library is a library that is attached to a higher education institution, which supports the curriculum and the research of the university faculty and students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are an estimated 3,700 academic libraries in the United States. Class reading materials, intended to supplement lectures by the instructor and housed in academic libraries, have historically known as "reserves". Before electronic resources became available, the reserves were supplied as actual books or as photocopies of appropriate journal articles. Modern academic libraries provide access to electronic resources.
The Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) at the University of California's Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, and Los Angeles campuses are centers for research, education, and scholarship in the fields of transportation planning and engineering. Faculty members, staff researchers, and graduate students comprise this multidisciplinary institute network of more than 400 people, which administers an average of $20 million in research funds each year. ITS Berkeley is an organized research unit with nine affiliated organizations and an eight-member advisory council.
Music librarianship is the area of librarianship that pertains to music collections and their development, cataloging, preservation and maintenance, as well as reference issues connected with musical works and music literature. Music librarians often have degrees in both music and librarianship. Music librarians deal with standard librarianship duties such as cataloging and reference, which become more complicated when music scores and recordings are involved. Therefore, music librarians generally read music and have at least a basic understanding of both music theory and music history to aid in their duties.
The Water Resources Collections and Archives (WRCA), formerly known as the Water Resources Center Archives, is an archive with unpublished manuscript collections and a library with published materials. It was established to collect unique, hard-to-find, technical report materials pertaining to all aspects of water resources and supply in California and the American West. Located on the campus of the University of California Riverside (UCR), it is jointly administered by the UCR College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) and the UCR Libraries. WRCA was part of the University of California Center for Water Resources (WRC) that was established and funded in 1957 by a special act of the California State Legislature and was designated the California Water Research Institute by a federal act in 1964.
Carleton Bruns Joeckel was an American librarian, advocate, scholar, decorated soldier, and co-writer, with Enoch Pratt Free Library (Baltimore) Assistant Director Amy Winslow, A National Plan for Public Library Service (1948) that provided the foundation for nationwide public library services.
The University Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign comprises a network of physical and digital libraries. It provides resources and services to the university's students, faculty, staff, and the broader academic community.
Emily Drabinski is an American academic, librarian, author, and teacher who served as president of the American Library Association from July 2023 to July 2024.
Deborah A. Carver is a retired Philip H. Knight Dean of Libraries at the University of Oregon (UO) in the United States.
The George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library is one of the subject specialty libraries at University of California, Berkeley, and is one of only three anthropology libraries at American research universities. The library supports the University of California, Berkeley anthropology department.
Lee Grodzins is an American professor emeritus of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After work as a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Grodzins joined the faculty of MIT, where he taught physics for nearly four decades. He was also head of R&D for Niton Corporation, which developed devices to detect dangerous contaminants and contraband. He wrote more than 150 technical papers and holds more than 60 US patents.
Ethel Grodzins Romm was an American author, journalist, project manager and environmental technology company CEO. She also served as Co-Chair of the Lyceum Society of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Carma Leigh, born Carma Russell, was an American librarian. She was the State Librarian of California from 1951 to 1972.
