Competency-Based Career Planning for Reference and User Services Professionals (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780838917800)

Jo Bell Whitlatch has worked in three academic libraries in many areas, including collection management, acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, reference, interlibrary loan, and library management. She has also taught at San Jose State University's Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and she is a past president of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Her research interests and areas of special competence are information-seeking needs and behavior, user studies in libraries, the evaluation of service organizations, and the management of academic libraries. Her publications include two books, The Role of the Academic Reference Librarian (1990) and Evaluating Reference Services (2000), and articles in Reference & User Services Quarterly, College & Research Libraries, Journal of Academic Librarianship, and The Reference Librarian. She has a Ph.D. in library and information studies and an M.A. in Asian studies from the University of California at Berkeley.

Beth S. Woodard has been an academic reference librarian for her whole career but developed deep interests in staff development and training and teaching when she coordinated a separate information desk staffed by graduate assistants. From training a dozen graduate assistants to coordinating an orientation program for 75 graduate assistants at the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign, she developed staff training programs, retreats, and wellness activities for the entire library--for librarians, academic professionals, and support staff in addition to graduate and undergraduate students. She is currently teaching reference and library management at the iSchool at UIUC.