Mary Cassner, one of the authors of the report on the USAIN conference, is an Assistant Professor and Subject Specialist Librarian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her duties include reference, collection development, and library instruction in her liaison areas of Forestry, Fisheries & Wildlife; Agricultural Meteorology; Entomology; and Dentistry. She holds B.S. and M.Ed. degrees from the University of Nebraska as well as the M.L.S. from Emporia State University.
Dana Boden
Dana W. R. Boden, the second of the authors of the report on the USAIN conference, is an Associate Professor and Subject Specialist Librarian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has liaison responsibilities for four departments in the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, namely Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication; Animal Science; Biochemistry; and Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences; plus the Center for Biotechnology. She holds a B.S. in Agriculture and an M.A. in Education from Western Kentucky University, and the M.S.L.S. from the University of Kentucky. She currently is working on dissertation research for the Ph.D. in Administration, Curriculum, and Instruction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Robin McBride
Robin McBride, the third of the conference report authors, is a reference librarian at C.Y. Thompson Library, the Agriculture and Natural Resources branch at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her liaison areas are Forestry, Fisheries, and Wildlife; Agricultural Meteorology; Biosystems Engineering; and Biometry. Among many other things, she is interested in making government documents and numeric data more accessible. McBride received her M.L.S. at RutgersUniversity, and she also has a B.S. and an M.S. degrees in soil science. Previously, she was a researcher in soil fertility and ecology at San Diego State University; that involved multidisciplinary research at an LTER research site in New Mexico.
Lillian Mesner
of the Agriculture Library of the University of Kentucky in Lexington
Margaret Merrill
from the University Libraries, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in
Blacksburg
Joseph N. Swab
ALIN Editor, National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland
Lillian Mesner, Margaret Merrill, and Joseph N. Swab
Also contributing to the conference report were Lillian Mesner of the Agriculture Library of the University of Kentucky in Lexington; Margaret Merrill from the University Libraries, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg; and Joseph N. Swab, ALIN Editor, National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland. Swab also served as the photographer for the USAIN/IAALD Conference, and selected photographs appear with this and the following articles.
USAIN awarded two $500 scholarships to new members to help with the costs of attending the joint USAIN/IAALD national conference inTucson, Arizona. The scholarships were set up to be awarded to librarians new to the field of agriculture or new attendees at a USAIN conference.
Thedis Washington
One of the scholarship awardees was Thedis S. Washington, who is the Agriculture Reference Librarian at R. M. Cooper Library, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. She is a native of Alabama. Thedis earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 1984 from Tuskegee Institute and an Master of Library and Information Science in 1995 from Louisiana State University.
After graduating from Tuskegee Institute, Thedis worked in food service, retail, and banking. She later ventured out to discover the library world at the Levi Watkins Learning Center, Alabama State University, in Montgomery, Alabama. She served as a serials assistant for two years and later moved to the reference department as a reference assistant providing traditional reference service and work with interlibrary loans. Thedis enjoyed working in the library so much that in 1994 she decided to enroll in library school at Louisiana State University and worked as the assistant to the editors of the RQ magazine. Thedis says she especially enjoyed her internship on the reference desk under the auspices of Emma Perry, Dean, Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Thedis is Clemson University's representative for the Fund for Rural America grant proposal. Among her other activities are serving as the Affirmative Action Chair, Special Libraries Association (SLA), and being an American Girl's Club (Clemson, South Carolina) mentor. Thedis is a current member of the United States Agricultural Information Network (USAIN), Special Libraries Association (SLA), Piedmont Library Association, and South Carolina Library Association. When she is not busy with library activities, Thedis enjoys reading, fishing, singing, and writing poetry.
Ina Pour-El
The other 1997 USAIN Conference scholarship awardee was Ina Pour-El, who is the designer and developer of the AgNIC Animal Science Web pages for the Iowa State University section of the NAL coordinated Agricultural Network Information Center. She also manages the associated online animal science reference service, AnSci Answers. A 1994 graduate of the University of Iowa, School of Library and Information Science, she was first hired as a temporary General Reference/Instructional Services librarian at Iowa State University in1995. After six months she transferred to the Science and Technology division. There she combines the subject expertise gained in her previous career as a molecular/cellular biology researcher with the skills of an MLS to assist patrons as a general science consultant and subject specialist. In her "free" time at the library, she's also acting Zoology/Genetics bibliographer and Chemistry/ Physics reference librarian, and she still enjoys working at the general reference desk.