1.
What is your name and your current title?
Rebecca Kuglitsch, Interdisciplinary Science Librarian
2.
When did you know you wanted to become a librarian? Do you still do it for the same reasons?
I was pretty sure I wanted to become a librarian in graduate school, getting my master’s in history of science. I really loved the research, loved helping colleagues find what they needed, and loved teaching, but wasn’t really satisfied. So I thought about becoming a librarian, which seemed to focus on my favorite parts of that experience.
3.
Why become a librarian? What major influence impacted that decision?
I became a librarian because I really love the context of higher education. I love helping people question what they know, answer their own questions, and discover things they care about. There are a lot of ways to do that, but this one fit my skills.
4.
How long have you been a librarian? Previous positions or work?
I’ve been a librarian about five years. I worked just over four years at the
University of Puget Sound, a small liberal arts college, where I was a liaison librarian for all the science departments. Here, it’s a bigger college so I can focus on just a few types of scholarship, mainly environmental studies and earth sciences (which go together very well, especially in the Colorado area).
5.
What surprised you about the field once you began your work?
How much librarians can do and want to do! I didn’t make use of librarians much as a student, because I was pretty sure they had something more important to do (not that I knew what it was, just assumed there was something). Once I started working I realized how very much that was untrue.
6.
Do you fit the image most people have of librarians? Why or why not?
Well, I do have very thick glasses, own many cardigans and usually wear flats...
But I am more often shushed than shushing.
7.
Describe an area of your work that you find most rewarding? Show or demonstrate. Share related resources or organizations.
I started answering this from the bottom up—hopefully some of the answers below get at this question. Let me know if not, though.
8.
Describe a trend, research topic, or line of inquiry that you find compelling in the field?

I mentioned below that I’m really interested in how people use tools and what makes them usable. I’m also really interested in how people learn to think about information (librarian term: information literacy)—especially about how people learn what information is appropriate to use when, and how they learn to transfer that skill to a new context.
9.
What excites you about the future of libraries? Is there a space, service, or material that you wish more members of the campus community were aware of about CU Libraries?
The thing that excites me about the future of libraries is how much is opening up.
We’ll be able to handle lots of interesting kinds of information, and get to work with people on using information that goes beyond texts (which I think will still be around). But it’s exciting to see that open up.
10.
When you're not in the library, what do you like to do around Boulder?
I like to run and hike. We moved here only in January, so I’m still getting to know the area and have mostly explored the foothills and it’s amazing to think of how much left there is farther in the mountains. I have a little community garden plot, which is fun but has really made water issues clear to me…
11.
What is the worst thing that has happened to you on the job?
Well, it wasn’t that bad, but it was pretty dramatic at the time. At my last job in
Washington at a pretty small library, when our director and the associate directors were out of town simultaneously, as happened occasionally, we used to say to them that it was fine, we wouldn’t burn the library down. Then they happened both to be out of town one day before the 4 th of July. And the library did actually start on fire! It was fine—there was a just a motor in the machine room that burned up, and a restoration team got the smoke cleaned up over the weekend starting immediately after the fire. But still.
12.
If you could be a character in a book/movie/game, who or what would you be?
The librarian from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, because I could eat all the food. Or possibly Orlando from Virginia Woolf’s novel—that would be fun.
13.
Do you think librarians will eventually be replaced by robots when SKYNET takes over?
Who says we’re not just extremely competent Turing-test-passing robots already?
14.
What technical resources do you use as a librarian?
I use a lot of citation management tools, basic productivity tools, pretty much any database in the sciences, our catalog, and the rest of the internet.

15.
What was the most memorable day you’ve had working as a librarian?
I’ve had a lot of memorable moments, but not exactly a memorable day, I don’t think.
16.
How has your job changed since you started and what sorts of jobs do you see librarians doing in 5 years? 10 years?
Well, I started here 9 months ago, so it hasn’t had much of a chance to change.
I’ve been working about five years. I’ve seen a lot more awareness of scholarly communication issues over that time, some neat technology come to fruition, and a lot of concern over budgets. In ten years, I hope librarians will be doing a lot of what we do now (working with people on research, teaching information literacy instruction) but also that we’ll be expanding to help people work with all kinds of information—data sets, GIS, filmed experiments.
17.
What are the best and worst aspects of the job?
Best: teaching, buying books, working with people on interesting questions
Worst: trying to get all the information people need with smaller budgets and dealing with journals constantly getting more expensive
18.
Can you name a couple of common things more students ought to know about the library or librarians?
It’s our job to help with research, all the way from choosing a topic to finding resources to figuring out how to manage them. We’re here to help find tiny specific bits of information, but it’s also hard to navigate the volume of information that’s out there, and that’s part of what we’re trained to do.
19.
If you hail from outside Colorado or the United States, why did you come to
CU Boulder?
My husband is from the area, and I grew up in the Midwest. It’s kind of silly, but I always wanted to live somewhere where there were mountains, for as long as I can remember. So that was one really appealing thing. But the other is that I really wanted to be in a place I could focus on a smaller subset of science, and environmental science is one of those that I feel fills a real need. CU Boulder has some amazing people working on environmental and energy questions, and is teaching even more of them. I feel really privileged to be here where so much is going on.
20.
What’s your favorite section of the library?
I enjoy the QHs—natural history. But my favorite location in the library is looking out at the mountains from Norlin Stacks.

21.
Are librarians becoming obsolete? Why or why not?
Well, I have an obvious bias, no?
But I think they are not. Librarians are about connecting people with the information they need and even as digital tools are making that easier in some ways, it’s still not automatic. People still need to learn to think critically about the information they find and how they might find it, manage it, and use it. I think librarians will stay useful as local, human faces that can help with those aspects.
22.
Are you in the Dewey decimal system camp or the Library of Congress camp?
Library of Congress! Dewey is constructed to fit the world as described by a nineteenth century guy into a base-ten system. I don’t think the world is that simple. Library of Congress can expand and change to fit current knowledge more easily.
23.
If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
Hm. Patagonia maybe? Or Chile? I think it would be pretty amazing to take a trip from sea level to the Andes. The Kamchatka Peninsula would be nifty too—like
Alaska on steroids. Both of these places are relatively challenging to get to, so that’s why I’d like to be magically taken there.
24.
If you could have dinner with anyone throughout history who would it be and why?
Maybe Maria Sybilla Merian. She was a 17 th century illustrator and scientist. She trained in her family’s business as an engraver, married and started a fairly conventional life. Eventually, she began focusing on insects and really made some of the first picture of the life cycle of insects—so finally people could see that the caterpillar and butterfly were the same organism, not two different ones. She travelled to Surinam with her daughter, and researched tropical insects, too. But there’s not a ton of private papers, or much way to see into her life, so it would be nifty to meet her.
But ask me on a different day and I might have a different answer.
25.
Do you have any hidden talents and if so what are they?
If I told you, they wouldn’t be hidden talents any more.
26.
When do you find enjoyment in your job?
When I can help someone make a new connection or develop a new idea. I also find a lot of enjoyment in just getting to learn new things all the time. Librarians get to hear about the fun parts of so many people’s work.

27.
What is your dream library to work in?
This is a pretty nifty one!
28.
What’s your favorite book?
I can never answer this question properly, because there’s a small stable and different books suit different moments.
29.
Why is coffee so expensive at the Laughing Goat?
You’d have to ask a business librarian!
30.
Can you give us three words to sum up the CU library?
Here for use.
31.
What’s your biggest pet peeve about this library or being a librarian? What about outside of the library?
Ooh, that’s dangerous. Pet peeve about being a librarian might be the printers. In any library, they are always malfunctioning, usually in a strange and unaccountable way. Happily at CU OIT comes and fixes them.
32.
Is there a top secret librarian club - what do you call it and where do you meet?
The first rule of librarian club is we don’t talk about librarian club.
33.
What’s the weirdest book you ever found in the library?
Oh, so many. At my last job I had to weed the health section, which had never, ever been weeded. Right now it is a three-way tie between Children’s Head
Injury: Who Cares?, a book of eye exercises endorsed by Aldous Huxley for the curing of all eye problems (didn’t work on me), and Christian Science Health
Culture, a book of early 20 th century physical culture exercises, nicely illustrated by photos of a man in his workout tie. See below:

34.
If you hadn’t become a librarian, what other job would you have done?
Hard to tell. Sometimes I think it would be fun to be in advertising, but I can only write persuasive copy for things I don’t like, which is a problem!
35.
What was the biggest late fee ever - or anything interested associated with it?
Most libraries have a cap on late fees, so they often can’t go over a couple hundred dollars. And I have not worked the circulation desk since I was a student, so I only hear the great stories secondhand…
36. Have you gained an interest in new subjects since beginning work in the library?
Yes and no. I’ve pretty much always been interested in the subject areas I work with, but I’ve definitely gotten a lot more interested in technology and how people use and interact with it, since that’s a huge component of the job. If I can’t give people strategies that work for them, they won’t use them. So it’s really interesting to me to think about why people like certain things, or find certain interfaces or process really annoying.