You may have noticed that WiLS has some new faces among its staff. We are excited to grow our skills and improve our services by bringing new members into our team while also leveraging the experience and strengths that our existing team contributes. In the coming months, we will be sharing a little more about WiLS staff members, both new and experienced, in their own words.
This month, we talk with WiLS’ most veteran staffer, Sara Gold, Community Liaison and Service Specialist.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
As an undergrad at UW-Madison, I was an English major mostly because I loved reading. I felt out of my element at such a large school until a friend introduced me to the Integrated Liberal Studies (ILS) program my sophomore year. It was in that smaller learning environment that I really felt connected to what I was learning. I ended up with a certificate in both ILS and Women’s Studies along with English. My early working years were spent in Chicago as a children’s book buyer for the ubiquitous Stuart Brent Books on Michigan Avenue. We had no computers so I knew every single title and how many copies of each we had in the store. Working at Stuart Brent enhanced my knowledge base of literature as well as introducing me to the world of trade publishing. Fun Fact: Visiting authors would drop in to see Mr. Brent who held court at a large round oak table in the back of the store. I remember Jackie Collins coming in and we had none of her books in stock. He had me run across the street to Kroch and Brentano’s to buy a bunch so she could sign them only to return them a week later. I also worked for a small academic publisher in Chicago and was able to learn the ins and out of publishing: from bidding paper costs to understanding the review process to sales. I then worked about ten years for Baker & Taylor as a rep to both schools and then later, independent bookstores. When the non-stop travel and tumult of the industry got to me, I asked my mentor, Jane Rowe, what my next step in life should be and she answered without hesitation and with great enthusiasm, “For heaven’s sake, go to library school!” So I did. I graduated from the UW- iSchool and worked as a Young Adult Librarian at Sun Prairie Public Library for five years before joining WiLS.
My personal life is unconventional but it suits me. I have 14-year-old daughter with my husband, Steve, three grown step-children and six grandchildren! I love people and have a long history of volunteering, especially with young people. The connections I make with them give me hope for our future. I love to travel and always want to pick up and move to the place I am visiting until I get homesick. I love big cities but also cherish the time I spend at the barn with my pony. I enjoy cooking, music in all its genres, podcasts (especially true crime and human interest ones), reading, and spending time with my extended family and friends.
What do you do in your role at WiLS?
I am a Community Liaison and Service Specialist who works with K12 and public libraries in the areas of cooperative purchasing as well as project management. For cooperative purchasing, I serve as a bridge between libraries and our vendor partners, working to discover, negotiate, and promote products and services that are of interest to our community. In addition, I serve as one of the project managers for the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium, in the areas of collection development, relationship building, and advocacy at a national level with publishers and other consortia. I also work with the Wisconsin Schools Digital Library Consortium, as a project manager in the areas of collection development and promotion. I also work on special projects like Money Smart Kids Read that provides books to school-age children in six states as part of Money Smart Week programming.
Why did you make the decision to do this job?
An opportunity opened at WiLS in 2007 for an electronic resources assistant. The job description seemed to fit my unconventional background of having both vendor and library experience and so the opportunity was intriguing to me. Fast forward eleven years and I feel so very fortunate to work with a team of people as smart, creative, driven, innovative, and kind as my colleagues. Not only am I proud of the work we do for our members and the library community at large, but I am also so grateful to have opportunities to grow both in interpersonal and technical skills while doing good work.
If money or capacity were no concern, what WiLS service would you implement or expand?
There are so many services I’d love to expand upon but they all come down to finding money and time for our member libraries. That said, I would design and implement a grant discovery and writing service. The service would help member libraries identify available funding sources to fit the projects or resources they are trying to add to their libraries such as makerspaces, online learning resources like Gale Courses, or afterschool programming for schools. In addition to identifying funding sources, the service would assist libraries in successfully completing grant applications from research to writing. The service would also include access to an open source portal of resources to aid libraries in the grant process.
What are you listening to or watching or reading right now that’s making you think?
I just finished Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter. It was recommendation by one of our WiLSWorld speakers, Kristin Eschenfelder. It is both frightening and enlightening at the same time, and so very relevant to me both personally and professionally. Keeping with the theme of addiction, I just started a fascinating book called The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison. As a person in recovery myself, I have read countless books on addiction and recovering but this is the first book I’ve encountered that explores the pressure some feel in recovery to remain extraordinary and unique when our stories share many common themes. How do recovering people find or lose their creativity, their passions, and their sense of joie de vivre in sobriety? These are questions that every recovering person has asked, if only to themselves, and having a book that articulates these thoughts out loud is particularly refreshing and empowering.
What do you see as a significant opportunity for our members in the next ten years?
I think (and hope!) as retail sales of digital materials flatten, trade publishers will reexamine their lending models to libraries, allowing more access to more titles simultaneously. In addition, self-published ebooks will gain more exposure with readers through a variety of platforms. I hope that the publishing industry will continue to work together towards ensuring greater accessibility for all readers including those using adaptive technologies.
I am also greatly encouraged by the national and local interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). We are facing a crisis in our academic institutions today with the prohibitive cost of textbooks and journals. In my opinion, information and knowledge should not be available only to those institutions and individuals who have the means to pay exorbitant prices. As Stewart Brand so astutely said over three decades ago, “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive…That tension will not go away.” I hope the OER movement will shift the balance of power from the latter to the former.
Sara is awesome. Want to connect with her about a potential project or idea that’s floating around? You can! Send her an email at sgold@wils.org.