Getting to Know the Wilf Librarians Part II
Shulamis Hes, Electronic Resources and Reference Librarian, Pollack Library
Josh Makovsky: What is your role in the library?
Shulamis Hes: I’ve been here for over 20 years and I make decisions about renewals of journals based on cost and usage. On occasion, I write research guides and teach classes. I also run a book talk series and help students do research.
JM: Do you have any favorite genres, books or authors?
SH: Lately, I’ve been reading work from this woman Lisa See, this book in particular, “The Island of Sea Women,” is really good. I used to not like to read Holocaust books, but now it’s become an obsession. There’s a book called the “Last Bookshop in London,” a historical fiction taking place during World War II. There’s another book about this man who was an architect who built hidden doors and spaces for Jews to hide in, who wasn’t even Jewish, called “The Paris Architect,” by Charles Belfoure. Once I find an author I like, I just read everything they put out.
JM: Do you have any tips or advice for students?
SH: We have a lot of information on our homepage. Under Research Help, there are a lot of resources you should start with. You should definitely make a one-on-one meeting with a librarian, instead of spending hours on end looking for someone to find things. We’re here to help. I personally like to be a detective to look for things that other people can’t find. I like to uncover it.
JM: What is your favorite part about working at Wilf? What is your favorite part about working in the library?
SH: I just like the energy up here. I see the difference between the intercession and during the semester. I see the people studying by Glueck, and here I see the people studying math and statistics. I just love that.
JM: What is your day to day like in the library?
SH: Lately, I’ve been working on a very intensive project. I’ve been compiling usage statistics on what resources are being used. I get emails and questions relating to research or troubleshooting access.
Deena Schwimmer, Archivist, Archives & Special Collections, Pollack Library
Josh Makovsky: What is your role in the library?
Deena Schwimmer: My title is archivist. We're a department of three people, so it's small and we're basically running our own sort of little library, in the sense that we do a lot of the functions that the larger library does, but we do it on archival material. As the archivist, I am looked toward to recommend best practices, methodologies and tools that ensure that our archival program runs strategically and efficiently.
JM: Why did you want to be a librarian? Did you always know that this is what you wanted to do?
DS: I originally worked in the private sector for a totally different type of job for over a decade and I started to think about whether that was where I wanted to be and I decided that I wanted to do something that might be a little more gratifying on a day-to-day basis. I've always been interested in history and at the time I thought of pursuing higher education, the doctorate route, but it seemed a little daunting because I'd already been out of school for so long. Archives was an opportunity to be involved in historical research and supporting historians without necessarily going through the entire Ph.D. route.
JM: What is your favorite part about working at Wilf? What is your favorite part about working in the library?
DS: I really do enjoy it. I've been here for 18 years.When I first started, the archives were on the sixth floor. It was not optimal. It was not built as an archival repository, so there weren’t enough shelves, there wasn’t the right size of shelves, there was just one elevator and it typically broke, there was no heat, there was no cooling. So it was challenging. But now I'm here and even just to get to my office every day I have to walk through the library and I have to say, I love that. It feels like you're in the center and you can see people using it, even if they're just using it for study space and even if they're not using our archives. It's great to feel like the library is an important space and resource.
JM: What is your day to day like in the library?
DS: It really depends. In terms of my day-to-day, we still do have people coming in who sit and use our materials, so if I have someone doing that I need to pull the material. We don't let people use our materials unsupervised because archival materials are just pieces of papers. If there are no researchers, there's always work on collections. Going back to the reference, a lot of people are just not able to come in anymore and we are trying to accommodate them as much as possible, so it requires us sometimes to do more research for them and answer their questions remotely.
JM: What’s one feature you would add to the archives if you could add anything?
DS: We have three major systems that we use to manage our work: our collection management system, our catalog of archival collections and our digital materials. Pretty much all of them are old and unsupported by whatever developing organization first developed them. So I would upgrade those. We don't necessarily have the resources, the skill and the knowledge on staff to know easily how to repair them if they crash. On the other hand, we've gotten some pretty good longevity out of them which is amazing given that many of them were open source and didn't cost us that much to develop in the first place. But, you want to try to be prepared as opposed to waiting for a disaster to strike.
Justin Thomas, Public Services and User Experience Librarian, Pollack Library
Josh Makovsky: What is your role in the library?
Justin Thomas: I'm the Public Services and User Experience Librarian. I interact with the users of the library so primarily students but also faculty and staff and some visitors. User experience — that’s something that’s happened in the last 10 to 15 years in the library world. The library is trying to maximize the experience, trying to make sure that it's running as well as it can, that it’s running for the benefit of the most people it can. We try to do surveys about library spaces, about group study rooms, about textbook usage; we try to sort of get a gauge on how prohibitively expensive textbooks may or may not be to students at YU.
JM: Why did you want to be a librarian? Did you always know that this is what you wanted to do?
JT: It was probably the second profession I thought of as a kid. I originally thought I wanted to be a veterinarian, just because I loved animals so much. But it wasn't too long before I realized I would have to put dogs down and I didn’t want to do that. I liked the public libraries that I went to as a little kid and I liked the people that worked in the libraries, but it turned out to be something I forgot over time. And then I got into comic books and I started drawing and I was like “oh I'm gonna draw.” Then I started playing bass and I was like “I'm gonna be a jazz musician.” I got my associates in jazz performance and I was doing that for a while around Baltimore and D.C. I was doing freelance gigs as a bassist and teaching music lessons. That didn’t pay the bills. Eventually, I was like “I need to go back to school.” By then I'd gotten my bachelor's degree and I couldn't even get a boring office job. Part of that was the Great Recession at the time in the 2000s. So I couldn't get a job, I was living with my parents and couldn't pay the bills. I was looking at all the graduate degrees and I saw library information science and then I was like “I think I wanted to do that when I was a kid. What would that be like?” So I ended up volunteering at the community college library where I got my associate’s in music and I instantly took to it. I instantly found out that all my non-musical skills worked incredibly well in the library world and also my desire to help people. Everything just fit and I found that what I was born to do, besides music, was work in a library and help people. I've been really happy and satisfied ever since.
JM: Do you have any favorite genres, books or authors?
JT: I don't like to listen to one type of music or watch one type of movie. I'm not that way with books either, but there's definitely certain types I gravitate towards. I end up reading a lot of non-fiction about music, a lot of music memoirs like Herbie Hancock’s memoir “Possibilities,” that's great. I read that last year. I'm currently reading “Fearless: The Making of Post-Rock.” I read non-superhero comic books a lot, like Daniel Klaus and that sort of thing, Brian K. Vaughn. I love “Saga” and “Paper Girls,” “Stray Bullets,” stuff like that. For fiction, I like Sayaka Murata, the author of “Convenience Store Woman,” “Earthlings” and “Life Ceremony.” “Earthlings” might be my favorite fiction book, but it's hard to say.
JM: What is your favorite part about working at Wilf? What is your favorite part about working in the library?
JT: I definitely love working with all my coworkers. It's gonna sound corny but they're like a second family. Of course, I love interacting with the students and helping them. The students, the culture, my coworkers and also the falafel pita at Golan Heights.
JM: What’s one feature you would add to the archives if you could add anything?
JT: Solo-study pods, for sure. More group-study rooms. With our wide student body, we may be a small university at the end of the day, but still, I think students need those more than they need a whole bunch of print books. That would be my dream if I had a magic wand because that’s what people want the most.
JM: What is something new you learned while working at the library?
JT: Working at YU, obviously you’re going to learn so much more about Jewish culture than you would normally get from media consumption or from having Jewish friends. Once you’re really in it at YU, you get to learn so much. And I did, it’s great.
JM: Is there a book you’re reading right now that you would like to recommend?
JT: A book I recently finished is “Wandering Stars” by Tommy Orange, which is the sequel to “There There.” I'm going to recommend “There There,” since you gotta start with the first one. Both books are great, they're fiction, they cycle through a whole bunch of different characters. The first book is kind of like a collection of short stories, more or less, that all converge at the end. It's about indigenous people in Oakland, CA and it's great.
Editor’s Note: This article was edited for clarity and brevity with approval of those quoted.
Photo Caption: Outside the Mendel Gottesman Library
Photo Credit: Josh Makovsky
