NASIG Newsletter

KATHRYN WESLEY
Maggie Rioux, Profiles Editor

The more of these profiles I write, the more I am struck by the preponderance in our field of accidental serialists – for many of us our karma seems to have caused us to just fall into some aspect of serials and then gotten hooked on them. Serials definitely are addictive.(1) Also their showing up at odd intervals (particularly the irregulars) causes them to fall into a pattern of random-interval reinforcement, which I learned, in a graduate course in a former lifetime, is the most strongly addictive of all.

This issue’s profile subject, Kathryn Wesley, exemplifies both the accidentalness and the addictiveness of this area of endeavor. Kathryn first got hooked on librarianship as a way of making herself employable. She started in college (Northeast Louisiana University – she’s definitely a southern girl) as a biology major, switched to English, and was persuaded by a cousin to get a minor in library science. She became both employable and a cataloging junkie. She worked for several years at the public library in Natchez, Mississippi, doing reference, cataloging and acquisitions (no serials yet to speak of).

Southern belles Carol Green, Kathryn Wesley and June Garner discover the
joys of Polish food during NASIG 2004 in Milwaukee. Photo courtesy of NASIG
member Paula Webb.

In 1991, Kathryn tried to break away from the path that fate had laid out for her, but even though she tried this before serials had taken hold as the final addiction, her attempt was doomed to failure. Seeking a life outside of librarianship, she took a job related to her original field of biology as a lab technician for a mid-sized poultry company in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was now living (how’s that for a career change?). The company had several feed production and processing plants scattered across Mississippi and Alabama and the lab was a separate facility which did quality-control testing of various sorts. It was a broad range of test subjects: nutritional content of feed and feed ingredients, pesticide residues in fat samples, assorted microbiological subjects (salmonella, listeria and other bad guys) and even QC testing on the wax-covered boxes that are used to ship chicken to restaurants and grocery stores. She started out doing calcium and phosphorus assays, then moved to doing prep work on fat samples. She says that wearing a lab coat to work was wicked cool, but unfortunately, that was about the only perk – the job paid minimum wage. She moved to an administrative assistant position and ended up in charge of the HazMat database for the company. There she was – cataloging and organizing data again, but not near as much fun as doing it in a library.

About this time Kathryn’s spousal unit decided he needed more education and they packed up and moved to Mississippi State University where our intrepid heroine found herself another library job (no lab coat, but decent pay), this time in acquisitions and serials. While hubby studied, Kathryn got herself hooked on serials.

Hubby finished his schooling and it was Kathryn’s turn. They went straight to library school at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she received her MLIS in 1997. The next stop was Clemson University in South Carolina (moving steadily east, but definitely staying south) where she started in March 1998 as a serials cataloger. She gets to solve all sorts of interesting database and cataloging problems, but no lab coat. No salmonella, either.

It was here, as soon as she started, that Kathryn was told by her supervisor that she was going to want to join NASIG and attend the conference. That first conference was Boulder, Colorado, and Kathryn says it was great positive reinforcement for both serials and NASIG. She was hooked on both. She decided to get involved in committee work and volunteered for Database & Directory, figuring that her experience in both cataloging and the database in the chicken lab gave her a solid background. She was right. Kathryn spent four successful years on D&D, the last two as chair. She was also a consultant to the group which developed our online conference registration system. She then moved on to spend two one-year terms on the Nominations & Elections Committee, again as chair in her second term. This past spring (for her sins), Kathryn was appointed editor-in-chief of the NASIG Newsletter (succeeding the wonderful Char Simser) and is now my new boss.

What’s next? Well, first there are a whole bunch of Newsletter issues to get out. Kathryn was well-oriented by her predecessor and thinks she’s starting to get the hang of it (Of course, she’s aided by a marvelous and highly-talented staff, especially the profiles editor). She’s done a lot of editing for friends and colleagues over the years, although on an informal basis, and says she’s actually more comfortable editing than writing. And of course we know she’s really well organized (there’s that chicken lab again). She also sees the Newsletter continuing to evolve. First we went all-electronic and now we’re starting to move from the static html format to a potentially-interactive newsblog format. “The Newsletter has always been one of the primary avenues of communication for the organization, but now that communication has the potential to be two-way.” Also, she says we should look for less capitalization – she wants less capitalization of Non-Proper Nouns. Yes, ma’am.

And after the Newsletter? Well, who knows. Our last two editors-in-chief have gone on to become NASIG presidents, so who can say, but if she’s elected, I think she should open the conference wearing a lab coat and maybe even carrying a rubber chicken. Don’t you agree with me, gentle reader?