Linda Chopra

The newly elected treasurer-elect of LIRT is Linda Chopra, Support Services Supervisor at the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library in Cleveland, Ohio. A member of ALA since 1988, she has been attending association conferences since 1992. She had been active for years in many capacities for both state and local professional organizations. However, she didn't have an opportunity to become active in any group within ALA, that is, until she happened to eat dinner with LIRT PR/Membership committee member Laura Bottoms in Miami. Laura invited Linda to attend her committee meeting the following day and the committee recruited her on the spot. She was asked to run for treasurer-elect of LIRT in the last ALA elections and was excited to be elected to an office in the Round Table after so short a time as an active member.

Linda's life experiences have prepared her for the ever-changing user group she encounters at her library. She was a "military brat", the daughter of a career Air Force man, and had the opportunity to live in many different states, in Europe, and in India before graduating from college, all of which have contributed to her enjoyment of teaching new customers from other cities and countries about her library's resources.

Her career began as a high school English teacher and school librarian. While her daughter was young, this schedule was convenient, but when her daughter became a teenager, she began to look for a way to expand her knowledge of reference services in a larger setting and with customers of all ages. She began her public library career in 1986 and reports that she has never regretted that decision. Seven years later she began supervising fifteen clerical, support, and computer staff members in the adult services department of her library, a job which is a continuing challenge, as many of her supervises are part-time and many are college students. Her teaching skills continue to be invaluable in the great amount of time she must spend training staff.

Linda and several of her colleagues provide formal instruction to the public on the use of their library's online catalog one night a month. These classes vary, depending upon the expanding array of electronic resources. They generally include keyword searching on the library's local database, as well as on resources such as Infotrac and the Cleveland Freenet. Much of the instruction she provides to customers is one-on-one, point-of-need instruction, but service demands rarely permit her to provide that type of instruction as thoroughly as she would prefer. Linda and her colleagues hope to expand the number of classes they are able to offer in the near future, in order to meet the need for more in-depth instruction. She states that she has "a particularly strong commitment to teach information-gathering skills to those who do not have the opportunity or means to acquire them elsewhere. The future of our nation depends upon the ability of our citizens to acquire and comprehend information on complex subjects and issues. Libraries are providing users with access to information in many different formats. . . and must now recognize the ongoing need for instruction to accompany this access."

Linda has co-authored two library instruction publications that were designed to guide high school students through the process of writing a research paper. Published by the Center for Learning in Cleveland in 1991, Research I: Information Literacy and Research II: Investigative Skills, Processing Information, and Writing a Formal Paper are due to be updated, and constitute the next big project on Linda's agenda.

Her life outside the library is a very active one. Some of her time is spent jogging, and she has progressed from entering local races with her running buddies for fun to completing a half marathon last fall. Her creative outlet includes making earrings from beads and semiprecious stones which she sells at local craft fairs. With relatives scattered from Puget Sound and Palm Spring s to France and India, she has many oppor-tunities to indulge her love of travel while visiting family.

Linda has found that her fellow round table members are very friendly and down-to-earth, and share many of her same concerns about library instruct ion. She loves the experience of meeting and talking to librarians from other states, countries, and kinds of libraries through ALA, and now is able to make a contribution to the larger organization through her commitment to LIRT for the next two years. Our congratulations and thanks to Linda for taking on this new challenge.

Marcia Boosinger, Bibliographic Instruction Librarian at Auburn University, is a member of LIRT's PR/Membership Committee.