WELCOME
BACK ISSUES
Patience Simmonds is the chair of LIRT’s Publications Committee. Through Patience’s guidance, the committee produced a much anticipated publication: Publish Your Article Outside the Library Field: A Bibliographic Guide to Non Library and Information Science Journals with Articles on Libraries, Librarians, and Library Science. This publication, which was sold in the ALA store at the annual conference in Chicago, provides important information, such as web and e-mail addresses for the various journals. Patience and other group members worked for a long time to pull this information together, in order that we could have easy access to a list of journals, other than library journals, in which individuals in our profession can publish. Patience credits Harvey Gover, John Spencer, and other members of the committee with the completion of this project through hard work and persistence. It was largely due to Patience’s organizational skills and her efforts to make sure everyone kept on task that the project was done in time for the annual conference.
As chair of the Publications Committee, Patience is responsible for overseeing the committee that produces resources such as the one mentioned above. The tasks that this committee must complete include editing, producing and distributing the resources. The committee is also responsible for establishing, maintaining, and disseminating the guidelines for LIRT publications. Kelley Lawton, a member of the committee, says that Patience is “dedicated to the profession and the committee and that she is very easy-going, humorous and wonderful to work with.”
Patience currently works at Behrend College Library at Penn State Erie as an instruction and reference librarian, and spends much of her time teaching. She often finds herself instructing as many as three classes a day, as well as coordinating many of the instruction sessions that other librarians are teaching. When she is not focused on the teaching and instruction aspect of her job, she works at the reference desk helping students and faculty find the resources they need for their various research projects. The rest of her time is spent on research projects of her own.
As is the case with many new instruction librarians, Patience was very anxious about her sessions early in her instruction career. She recalls a day back in the early ‘90s when she had to teach three sessions. The last one was at the end of the day; and she was very tired, had little of her voice left, and to top things off, the session was a business writing class. With all odds against her, Patience stepped up to the plate and taught a wonderful class. She was pleasantly surprised at the end of the class when the students and professor applauded her instruction and efforts. She says that it is the moments like these that make her job so rewarding.
Before coming to the United States, Patience worked on the Ghana Library Board. After arriving in the US, she worked as a Reference Librarian for a year at the Rockford Public Library. Instruction has been part of her job since 1993. Patience advises all instruction librarians, including those who are experienced, to learn from one another. It is vitally important, she explains, to “share ideas, expertise, knowledge and experience with other instructors.” This can be done by watching others teach, engaging in discussions on listservs, and participating in organizations such as LIRT.
In the little spare time that Patience carves out for herself, she enjoys spending time at home with her daughter, Sybil and her three sons, Nii, Nana-Kwame, and Nana-Yaw. She also enjoys listening to West African music and country music, as well as cooking Ghanaian dishes.
Tracy Hull is Communications Liaison and Reference Librarian at Georgia State University’s Pullen Library.
LIRT News, December 2000. Volume 23, number 2.
To report problems, please contact the LIRT News Production
editor
at jronan@ufl.edu