Fatemah Van Buren, Head of the Earth Sciences/Map Library, will be retiring at the end of June, after serving in various positions at UC Berkeley since 1984. Fatemah has been an active and tireless cartographic and geosciences specialist, and has worked hard in the past several years to greatly increase the size and scope of our digital map collection. She is an active member of the UC Stanford Map Group, and the Western Association of Map Librarians. She has initiated many digital preservation and digital publishing projects, and is always looking for ways to acquire and digitize important maps and materials for our faculty and students. Her expertise in cartographic cataloging has made her a valued member of the UC Map Group as well as beyond UC.

Fatemah is sought after for her expertise by faculty and students, and has developed partnerships with colleagues far and wide. She has provided excellent stewardship of the Earth Sciences/Map Library, and she will be missed by her staff and by colleagues throughout the library. We say farewell to her with great appreciation for her tremendous contributions, and wish her well in her future projects.

We are pleased to announce that Brian Quigley has agreed to serve as the .5 FTW Interim Head Librarian of the Earth Sciences/Map Library beginning in July. Brian, who has served as the Head of the Mathematics Statistics Library since 2007, will continue in that position half-time for the interim. For those of you who have not yet met Brian, he has been at Berkeley since 2000, where he first began his career as the Electronic Outreach Librarian in the Kresge Engineering Library.

Isabel Stirling
AUL and Director, Public Services 

Pati was recently notified that she has been awarded a full scholarship to attend the ACRL Rare Books and Manuscripts Pre-Conference Meeting in June. The 50th Annual RBMS Preconference is entitled "Seas of Change: Navigating the Cultural and Institutional Contexts of Special Collections," and will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Pati Moran has been a student since last fall in the San Jose State University library program, and has taken "Archives and Manuscripts," a class taught by David de Lorenzo of the Bancroft Library.

Jean McKenzie
Head, Kresge Engineering Library

Virginia Shih, the librarian for Southeast Asia, has been awarded a commemorative medal by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Vietnam for her work with the Han Nom special collections held by the National Library of Vietnam. She has been instrumental in organizing an international project to preserve and digitize these rare materials, consisting of about 5,000 volumes of classics, history, philosophy, and literature dating back to the 10th century. The award, presented by Pham The Khang, the National Librarian of Vietnam, is given to the most distinguished librarians of Vietnam, and is usually awarded to librarians only after long years of distinguished service. Virginia received this award at a ceremony in May in Hanoi. See www.nomfoundation.org for more information on the project.

Please join me in congratulating Virginia on this wonderful achievement. 

Allan Urbanic
Head, International and Area Studies
Doe/Moffitt Libraries

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Cheryl Cook to the position of Head of Acquisitions, beginning July 6, 2009. Cheryl comes to us from the Library of Congress, where she has served since 2005 as Supervisor of the Automated Planning & Liaison Office (APLO), a 22-staff unit which provides information technology support to the Library Services Service Unit. During her tenure in APLO, Cheryl served as acting chief for a year. From 1991-2005, Cheryl served as Library Services Specialist with the LC Cataloging Dsitribution Service, where she was responsible for developing a range of cataloging products including Classification Web. Cheryl will be a familiar face to several in the Library, having worked from 1980 to 1989 as a serials cataloger in Technical Services.

Cheryl holds both Bachelors and Masters degrees in Comparative Literature from UC Riverside (English, Russian, German), as well as a M.B.A. (emphasis in government and nonprofit administration) from San Francisco State University. She is currently enrolled in San Jose State University's Library and Information Science program, where she is completing her third Master's degree.

Cheryl is uniquely poised to help the Library confront ongoing and emerging issues in acquisition management and client services, given her educational background and her broad range of responsibilities in technical services, technology product development, and management functions. Please join us in welcoming her back!

Chuck Eckman, AUL Collections, and Lee Leighton, AUL Technical Services

ACRL has recently published Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University by Char Booth, who serves as the E-Learning Librarian in Doe/Moffitt Instructional Services. Informing Innovation examines Ohio University's efforts to move away from "technolust" and towards a culture of assessment in developing and implementing technology initiatives. Char presents findings from a study at Ohio University investigating the convergence of students and libraries with emerging information, communication, and academic tools. Joan Lippincott calls the book a "must-read" for academic librarians.

The publication is available as a free digital download on the ACRL site at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/digital/

Jennifer Dorner
Doe/Moffitt Instructional Services