Speaker biographies

Keynote Speaker

vanessa fox
Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and host of the weekly podcast Office Hours. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was recently named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Look for her book Marketing in the Age of Google in early 2010.
 

Concurrent Session Speakers

Ian Duncanson is one of the teen librarians at the Beaverton City Library, where he has worked for the past three years. Prior to that, he worked in various capacities at the Free Library of Philadelphia and Indiana University. He is also an active OYAN member, and is the chair of the OLA / OASL joint committee for 2010. He loves Facebook, but like Susan, is still a bit “Twitter-phobic!”

Anne Hiller Clark is the Shaw Librarian, responsible for all aspects of the Shaw Historical Library’s operations, including in-depth research assistance to scholars and researchers, collection development and management, and production of the library’s publications.  She also works as an instruction services and collection development librarian at Oregon Institute of Technology. She has published papers in scholarly scientific and historical journals, including the Journal of the Shaw Historical Library. Anne’s interest in local history dates back to her undergraduate days. She feels that historical libraries both create and collect local history and working at the Shaw Historical Library is a wonderful opportunity to put that belief into practice.

Karen Munro is Head of the UO Portland Library & Learning Commons. She’s interested in video games, user-centered design, good teaching, and the Big Question: how can libraries thrive in the New Media Environment? She’s currently obsessed with learning better graphic design and typographic skills, and with creating useful, beautiful infographics to help teach information literacy.  She’s reading Roddy Doyle’s newest novel, The Dead Republic, and thinking about color wheels.
 
Laura Orr, the Washington County Law Librarian since 2002, has her J.D. from Temple Law School in Philadelphia and her B.S. and M.L.S. from Indiana University, Bloomington. She has worked for the Free Library of Philadelphia, Multnomah County Library, University of Maryland Law School library, two academic law libraries in Bristol, England, Willamette Law School library in Salem, Oregon, and the Yale Law Library in New Haven, Connecticut. She has published articles and taught classes on American and English legal research and served as coordinator and panelist on various lawyer and librarian programs.
 
Cristine Paschild is the Head of Special Collections and University Archivist at the Portland State University Library.  Prior to joining Portland State in 2008, she was the Director of Collections Management and Access at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.  An Oregon native happy to be home, Cris is an active member of the Northwest Archivists and interested in promoting collaboration between librarians and archivists in reference and instruction.
 
Bob Schroeder is an instruction librarian and Coordinator of Information Literacy at Portland State University. There he courageously attempts to inspire and coach about 2,000 freshmen each year to enter the icy, tumultuous waters of the River of Academic Research.  He also teaches the Reference and Electronic Databases class to the Portland cohort of Emporia’s SLIM program where, amongst other things, we ponder the virtue of virtual reference. Up until about 6 months ago a confirmed VR skeptic, now, under duress, he might concede the possibility of VR having a slight chance of being relevant.
 
Steve Silver is library director at Northwest Christian University, a small private liberal arts school in the University District of Eugene. Steve earned his MLS from Emporia State University in 2006. He has worked in the Kellenberger Library at Northwest Christian since 1995, first as Technical Services Assistant, later as Technical Services Librarian, and currently as the Library Director. Steve is a member of the ACRL-OR/OLA Academic Division board as well as OLA, and has participated in the OLA Technical Services Round Table. Steve is also a member of ALA, ACRL, and LLAMA.
 
Susan Smallsreed is Currently Youth Librarian at the Northwest Branch of Multnomah County Library (MCL); Chair of MCL's Teen Action Team (TAcT); and Co-chair of the Oregon Young Adult Network (OYAN).  Susan spent 20+ years managing residential treatment programs for children, ages 9-18, until she saw the light and became a librarian.  A semi-Luddite, she uses Facebook & text messaging to communicate the NWL teen council, but swears she'll never have a Twitter account.  Her life just isn't that exciting.  ;>
 
Beverly Stafford is a Reference Librarian for Multnomah County Library.  Along with reference, she develops the music score collection and prepares library trainings. Up to the advent of the internet era, she was a Reference Librarian at Lewis and Clark College, organized the original library for the Oregon College of Art and Craft, worked in a school library, and was a library manager in Florence, Oregon. The perspectives of these diverse library environments all come in handy for L-net, where questions come from everywhere.
 
Caleb Tucker-Raymond is one of the people in charge of L-net and this conference. He is interested in usability testing as reference work, evidence-based virtual reference practices, and helping Oregon libraries realize the future.

Dale Vidmar is a full professor and the Information Literacy and Instruction Coordinator/Education, Communication, Health, Physical Education, & Leadership Librarian at the Southern Oregon University Hannon Library. He is the author of several publications and presentations about reflective teaching, peer facilitation, and intentionality in teaching and reference.