Dixie worked for the library long enough to see it evolve from a small-town, volunteer organization into a professionalized department of the City. From 1986, when Judy Duer became the Georgetown library’s first director with a Master of Library Science degree, to 2007, when there are seven professional librarians on the staff, change was happening all around as Dixie sat quietly at her desk, selecting books. In the future, book selection will be shared among these professionals, each of whom has many other duties. Today, few public libraries can afford the luxury of a staff member whose sole job duty is book selection.
Three of our professional librarians have joined the staff during the past five months and I hope you may already have become acquainted with them. Bethni King, the young adult librarian, arrived this spring, just in time to be baptized in the fire of planning and directing the summer reading program for teens. Our previous young adult librarian left in August 2006, but the Teen Advisory Board (TAB) had continued to meet with another staff member so Bethni wasn’t entirely alone. She and the TAB concocted what turned out to be a very successful program they called Around the World in Eighty Days—two months of Friday afternoon events, each focused on the food and culture of a different country.
Bethni came to us from the Las Vegas Clark County (Nevada) Library District, where she had been a reference librarian. While working on her Master’s degree—which she received from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee–she became especially interested in children’s and young adult services, so she was attracted to the young adult job here. Georgetown’s close proximity to her family in Liberty Hill added to the appeal. Bethni is married and has a two-year-old son.
Suzette Davidson, our new reference librarian, joined the staff in June. She’s here because she loves doing reference work. Thank goodness for people like her, who see every obscure question as a personal challenge! She received her Master of Science in Information Science from UT-Austin and had been taking advanced coursework when our job was advertised. Suzette retired from an earlier career with the Army, where she was in the finance corps and was a contracting officer. Born into an Air Force family, she has lived on all the continents but Australia, and, while she is proud of her son the Army officer who is continuing the family tradition, she’s even more proud of her three young grandsons.
The most recent addition to the staff is Richard Groves, our adult services librarian. In the past, the reference and adult services responsibilities often rested on the shoulders of the same person. With the new library building the City Council approved a new position so that we could split these jobs and allow each to have the attention it deserves. Richard received his Master of Science in Library Science from the Catholic University of America in 2006. During his undergraduate years at George Washington University and while he was in grad school, he worked for the Association of Research Libraries in Washington, DC. Upon arriving in central Texas, he took a job as a “cave man” (his description) at Inner Space Caverns. Although he enjoyed leading tours there, it wasn’t appealing enough to keep him from applying for our position as adult services librarian. He will be planning programming for adults, something that the Georgetown Public Library could provide only on a limited basis in the past, because we had neither the place in our old building for gathering, nor the staff to do planning and arranging. He’ll also be managing the library’s meeting room rentals and working at the circulation and reference desks. Richard is recently married and lives in Austin.
During September, Dixie Hanna, a staff member, passed away. She had been on the staff more than twenty years, longer than anyone else who has ever been employed at the Georgetown library. More important than longevity, though, was the work she did. For most of her library career she selected all of the adult materials—books, audiobooks, and videos. Although she had had a satisfying career as a nurse, books were what she really loved.
On Friday, November 9, at 2:00 p.m. in the library community rooms, Susan Wittig Albert will present “How I Got to Be Carolyn Keene and What Happened After That.” Her latest books are Spanish Dagger, in the China Bayles herbal mysteries series, and The Tale of Hawthorn House from the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter series. Ms. Albert also collaborates in literary crime with her husband, Bill, to create the Robin Page Victorian mysteries.