About Us

We’re a group of library workers who are passionate about books, movies and music. We’ve started this blog so we can tell you about all the cool stuff you might not know we have here at the Main Library; after all, there are about three million items in the building, so we figure you might have overlooked some of them. On top of that, we get new items almost every day, and we want to make sure you know about them.We don’t just want to see our names in print, though–we’d like to know what you think about the blog posts we write, and the materials we review, so please feel free to leave us comments. We also take requests, so if you have suggestions for future blog posts, we’ll be happy to consider them.Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy the blog!

Eleventh Stack team bios:

Amy is a staff librarian in the Film & Audio department. She has a fondness for obscure Japanese mystery novels and true tales of the Gilded Age, though neither one really relates to film or audio. Sometimes her hair is blue, sometimes it is not.

Bonnie has been a librarian for several months now and feels the best part of working in a library is mending broken, damaged books. This may stem from a heart overflowing with compassion, but more realistically it is because she likes gluing and taping things. In her free time she likes karaoke, Scrabble, playing cards, and avoiding books that have sad endings.

Don is a senior staff librarian in the Reference Services department. He’s a lit guy: high-end, sci-fi, comics, horror, Proust, Hesse, Austen–you name it. And, oh yeah, he lives for poetry. And music. And films. And….

 

Gwen is a senior staff librarian in the Reference Services department. She likes books that explore the resilience of humanity; in short, she reads nearly everything. Her interests at this time are sewing, gardening, and epistolary novels.

Irene left the high fashion world of used bookstores to become a librarian, and now works in the Reference Services department. Her taste in books runs the gamut from fiction to poetry to women’s studies to popular science to spirituality. She knits socks obsessively, often while watching 80’s-era Aaron Spelling TV shows.

Julie’s intellectual curiosity recently led her from sales work in Seattle to a Master’s in Library Science degree at the University of Pittsburgh. Favorite subjects to read, think, and write about include the cultural history of food, time, transportation, consumer culture and modernity, how we got here, and poetry. She’s good at close reading and harmony singing, and believes we’re all doing the best we can.

Kaarin is the relatively new manager of the First Floor – New & Featured area of the Main Library, where she is happy as a clam surrounded by fiction, cookbooks and a bunch of really creative people. While she’ll read almost any kind of fiction, her non-fiction interests lean toward memoirs and spirituality. She loves to look at the pictures in decorating, design and craft books, a habit picked up during her nine years as an art librarian. And she can’t describe herself without mentioning that if she’s not reading, she’s probably dancing.

Leigh Anne became a librarian because she didn’t want to buy, sell, or process anything.  She’s been an info desk clerk, a library assistant, a librarian, and a senior librarian during her seven years at Main, and thinks the only thing better than working at CLP would be to have her own goat farm.  Her favorite read thus far in 2009 is Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and her favorite “new” television series this year is the complete run of The League of Gentlemen. Someday, when she grows up, Leigh Anne wants to be just like Katharine Hepburn.

Lisa works as a library assistant on the First Floor and is wildly fascinated by found objects left behind by patrons. Her reading interests include vegetarian cookbooks, fiction featuring existential dilemmas, memoirs about childhood and books with pretty pictures. When not in the company of her previously mentioned interests, Lisa is probably sitting with a cat in her lap or making soup.

Melissa is a librarian on the First Floor, and is relishing that her job now requires her to work with books again, after being one of the library’s computer instructors for 9 years.  She likes reading memoirs and biographies (especially those of chefs), cookbooks, women’s studies and history, chick lit, and any books where the central figure is a librarian.  But her first and greatest love is mysteries.  She’s read everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, even those hard-to-find romances.  When not reading, Melissa enjoys playing on the Wii with her son, having dinners with her best friends, and going dancing with the neighbors.  She fell in love with Italy while visiting there in 2007, and is trying to learn Italian.  Ciao!

Renée is a First Floor librarian assistant involved with the graphic novel collection and poetry and music-related library programming. She likes to read about mythology, world politics, popular science, vegetarian cooking, poetry and good old-fashioned fiction, which you can tell from her goodreads account. She also listens to shortwave radio and makes collages (which means she likes cutting up books as much as reading them).

Scott has been a librarian for 10 years, and a gamer for 25 years. He works in the Reference Services department on the 2nd floor of the Main Library (he’s the bald one). He has also worked freelance for the adventure gaming industry, designing several miniature battle games and some role-playing supplements. He paints miniatures, reads superhero comics, and does a lot of push-ups.

Tim is a drummer. He also is a music librarian who attended 96 concerts in 2007. In addition, he watched 39 operas in 18 months, kept a list of books read since 2001, and has recently started keeping track of movies (especially Broadway musicals) seen since December 2007. Not surprisingly, he has great affinity for obsessive-compulsive eccentrics. When he dies, he’d like to be buried in a coffin full of lentils. Tim’s metal band is faster than Wes’s (see below).

Wes is a newbie Library Assistant in the First Floor – New and Featured Department, and one of the few library workers who has a dog instead of a cat. He really enjoys reading science fiction and nonfiction, and spends an inordinate amount of time obsessing over the current state of the multiverse. When he wants to come back down to earth, he reads books by guys like Jack London and Herman Hesse. Wes’s hobbies outside of books include eating food prepared by his cookbook-loving librarian friends, drinking craft beer, and watching TV shows made for HBO. Wes’s metal band is louder than Tim’s (see above).

Guest bloggers/ Occasional contributors

Beth has now survived three years as the manager in Customer Services (she still can’t decide if it’s harder than being on-call for her last job in healthcare). She thinks her staff is incredible with all the daily problem-solving they have to do. She was a collector of Nancy Drew books when young, and an avid sci-fi reader. Right now she’s a big fan of the foreign film collection at the Main Library. Her reading lately has been books by authors she has heard speak at various lecture series. She occasionally works as a techie in the theatre and tries to do good work in the areas of homelessness and domestic violence.

Dave is an intern who has been with the library for nearly five years in the Customer Services department. An avid cyclist, he enjoys being on his bike whenever possible. Please don’t run him over.

Jane has recently returned to Pittsburgh after a 30-year detour to the wilds of Montana. Thankful to be spending most of her time in the great indoors, she enjoys crossword puzzles, opera, Project Runway, and is currently in the middle of a great personal property purge–to make way for the future by clearing out the past. During this process she was thrilled to discover that her basement really does have a floor.

Jude is a librarian on the First Floor here at Main. She’s been an information geek and community educator for a long time, but a “real” librarian for less than a year. Nonetheless she feels sure that she wants to spend many more years as a member of this rowdy bunch. Health care access, crafts and organic gardening are a few of the gazillion interests that she has.

Kathie is the manager of Main’s Music department. An accomplished professional, she has many years of library experience with, as well as personal interest and involvement in, matters musical and artistic.

Laura loves to wear her hair in a bun. Her library favorites include patrons walking + reading at the same time and the privilege of overlooking a prehistoric landscape from 5th stack. She loves very tiny hardback novels, cookbooks that are more book than cook, and anything having to do with Jacques Cousteau. The entire blog team misses Laura already, but wishes her and “Mr. Laura” well as they set off on their new life adventures together!

Marianne (a/k/a MA) is the crazy, eccentric redhead that you see wandering cheerfully about the library on a daily basis. A historian by trade, Marianne prides herself in her extensive knowledge of anything Medieval or Romanian. She currently works in the Interlibrary Loan Department, and is always seeking new ways to expand her already vast horizon, which is littered with her many activities of painting, knitting, crocheting, yoga, reading, writing, sketching, traveling, etc., etc….

Richard is the manager of Reference Services and never bothered with children’s books after reading the entire Hardy Boys series when he had the chicken pox. He’s an old-school, hands-on person who learned most problems can be remedied with a pair of pliers, a 9/16″ box wrench, and a flathead screwdriver. That’s an indication of his maturity as a mechanic: he no longer relies on a 5 kilo sledge hammer. Richard’s preferred reading is non-fiction – history, military history and contemporary issues. When he deigns to read fiction, it needs to be either historic, techno-trash or gritty realia. His fondest wish is for James Lee Burke and Lawrence Block to collaborate on a work that brings together New Iberia’s Dave Robicheaux and New York’s Matthew Scudder.

Sarah is the Manager of the Film & Audio Department, though her first love is books. This means she spends a lot of time feeling guilty about watching films instead of reading books or feeling guilty about reading books instead of watching films.  Lately, she spends a lot of guilt-free time reading books to her two young boys. Finally, Sarah’s husband plays guitar in Wes’s metal band and she agrees that it is louder than Tim’s (see above). 

Sheila is the Assistant Director for Main library services, and a voracious reader who reads at least 100 books a year, many of which are romances. She also enjoys swimming, sewing, and cooking, though not necessarily in that order, and invitations to her dinner parties are fiercely coveted because her food is not to be missed.

Tanya served as an intern at CLP Carrick and CLP Main, as part of the CLP Minority Summer Intern program in 2009.  We thoroughly enjoyed having her as part of the team, and her contribution to the smooth sailing of so many library tasks is deeply appreciated.