 Thank you for joining us for this San Jose State University iSchool Career Podcast. My name is Kim Doherty and I'm the iSchool Career Consultant. Today, I'm going to be interviewing an information professional and good friend who I've admired for years, D. Magnani. You may know D. as the past president of SLA, but as you'll soon learn, this is only one of the high impact roles that she's been in throughout her LIS career. She fairly recently took yet another step forward in her diverse path as an information professional, which she's going to tell us about today along with some other information. So D, let's start off with your fairly new official title and a description of what your position entails. And then could you tell us a bit about the position you had previously? Absolutely. I am currently at Rutgers University in New Jersey and my title is the Assistant Vice President for Information Services and Director of New Brunswick Libraries. And that's a lot of words for, I am in charge of New Brunswick Libraries. Now Rutgers is a university with four major campuses. There's Newark Camden, RBHS, which is our Health Sciences, and then New Brunswick. New Brunswick itself is made up of College Avenue campus, which is where Rutgers was born and began, Old Queens, we're more than 250 years old now. And Douglas College, which was the women's school, Cook's campus, which is the birthplace of the Agricultural School and Land Grant College. So it's where the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences is. The Livingston campus, which has the Business School and a number of social sciences, and then the Bush campus, which is where engineering and sciences and pharmaceuticals and all sorts of other sciences are. So New Brunswick is the elephant in Rutgers, I suppose you could say, it's five campuses in one. And so I have seven core libraries, special collections in university archives and an annex that fall under me. And so it's a wonderfully diverse and broad and exciting role, and no two days are alike. And I love being here. I actually grew up in New Jersey, so this is a homecoming for me. I've had four generations of family earning more than 14 degrees here at Rutgers, so you could say I've come home. But I've been here 18 months now. I came from New Mexico, where I was at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and there I was head of their research library. So very different role. Our students that were there were mainly ones that showed up in the summer from universities across the United States. We really had postdocs and major scientists there. I needed a security clearance to run the research library there. And I like to say that we covered everything, science and technology at Los Alamos. And so there was a very different role, and yet I have a strong STEM background. I worked at MIT. I worked at a cryogenic vacuum company. And so I've had a number of roles in technology, although I've also had roles in advertising. I worked at Wyden and Kennedy, which does the Nike ads and such. So I actually have quite a diverse background, but quite strong in STEM. And in terms of the STEM background, for a lot of students who are thinking about where the opportunities are, STEM is being or STEM types of companies and opportunities and information roles are being sort of looked at as an emerging opportunity. Do you think that people like me, for example, who graduated with an undergrad in comparative literature and don't have a strong STEM background, could nevertheless move into these roles and learn if they were sort of committed to learning that discipline or at least the basics of it? I think this is absolutely something that can be explored. And in fact, you would find examples of people with allied degrees or similar backgrounds that migrate toward these roles. I myself went to Lehigh University as an undergraduate. I was an arts engineer. That's how I started. I then was an arts business person and ended up with an English and government degree. And so you could say I had the perfect librarian background because I studied everything. So I did have physics and chemistry and some engineering basics and computer programming courses in there. However, there is no STEM in my BA degrees degrees that I received from Lehigh. So I suppose you could say I am a poster child for that. Although they counted the fact that I had taken physics and chemistry and computer programming as good enough as an entree card. And in fact, I'd love science. So I think having an appreciation and perhaps a passion for some of these things and a curiosity. Curiosity is so, so important for these roles can indeed lead you to gain some experiences and maybe start. You know, I had first more general roles in my younger professional career. And then I moved into slightly tailored ones. I was in an architecture library for a while and then I picked up contract work. It was in one of those periods where there was hardly any library jobs out there. And so I did some journals work for an engineering company and that put a technical company in my background. And then I was actually hired as corporate librarian at this cryogen cracking company that I've referenced before. And there I was. I had a direct role in technology and science. I did cryogenics and acumen research for the engineers and scientists at this company, which led to my MIT role where I was actually the business librarian. But MIT being MIT, they hired me as a business librarian because it's my STEM background. And you've said sort of the recurring phrase for so many of us who have had these sort of eclectic careers, which is, and then that led to, and then that led to. I think that's a great lesson for students and new professionals is that that's how careers evolve, is that you take that first step and then that opens up another opportunity and then you move into another opportunity. So I'm gonna back you up a little bit then and ask you, when you were graduating from your MLIS program, what job did you expect to be doing or what did you think your career was gonna look like? Well, I'd need to back that up just a little bit more to say why I went to library school in the first place. I happened to marry someone in the Navy and we were being moved every six months to three years. And I had taken the GREs, I had planned to go to graduate school and those test scores were going to go bad because being in the military and moving around so much, we started our family right away. So I had three children post bachelor's degree by the time I was 25. Oh my gosh. So life was very busy and intense right away. And so there we were being moved around in the submarine community and my GRE scores were gonna go bad and I thought, my goodness, what can I do? And thought about librarianship because they could frankly send us to Guam and there would be a library. So I looked at it from the flexibility standpoint and frankly that has been one of the most wonderful aspects of getting an MLIS degree is the ability to adapt and change and move into different roles no matter what life was doing or how I was evolving as a person and a human being. So I went to library school and learned way more about librarianship and then I ever realized because, you know, frankly I had used a library but I was probably like most undergraduates and I thought anybody standing behind a desk was a librarian and so I got quite an education when I went to library school. So my expectations coming out, we as a family were deciding to my husband would leave the military so that he would be more than a picture on the mantle piece for our children. And so we had to line up what would my husband do and what could I do and how did we map that together? And so frankly, I was fairly open. I had learned about corporate libraries. I thought that was pretty fascinating that they actually existed. I thought I would become an academic librarian. I just loved academia. I loved being at college. I would still be a student if I could just keep reading and now thinking for the rest of my life. Another good reason to become a librarian, you get to think and be curious constantly. But anyway, so I did that post graduation applying for jobs and I had to have part-time work for a number of years simply because it was that period. Another period of there being no real permanent long-term jobs or very few on the market, 100 people applied for each one. And fresh out of library school, that was a challenge. So gosh, I did some work at Utica College actually that was a, it was a couple of year position in upstate New York. I learned how to teach at that point. They weren't really doing instruction in library school and I was a really terrible teacher for students. Now it's what I miss most being an administrator because I love to teach. And from there, I actually did grant work at RPI in Salire. And there I worked on hyperlinked collections. So it was really before the internet was databases. The way we use information now, it just wasn't there yet. We weren't even talking perky and stuff yet. And so I worked on this hyperlinked instruction program and I worked with the physics department and with their design department and with the libraries. And so there I gained some technical expertise that I would have never gained before. And then we, you know, we danced off to Rhode Island. That's when we officially left the military and I was at Roger Williams University for a little while. And then I had my corporate jobs and I feel like technology that was actually my first full-time job with benefits. And it was really exciting to get that. So I think I probably went a little awry from your question but once again, it was lots of steps to get to. Well, no, actually that's perfect because I think what you, a couple of things takeouts from what you just were talking about is the adaptability of the skill set and the need for sort of a resiliency in your career that if this thing goes away, okay, I bounce back, what am I going to do next? And to your very wonderful points in your descriptions, there's always sort of something that you can move to next if you are willing to create those opportunities if they're not being offered to you in the moment. So from my perspective, that's really helpful to know. So let me now bring you up to where you are now but you can go broader and deeper on this question if you want. What skills would you say are most in demand or important in the job that you have now? And how has that sort of changed over your career? Well, now I'm an administrator. So do you want me to answer as an administrator? Yes. What are the most important? Yes, okay. Resiliency. There are challenges in higher education today that are well, frankly, being experienced I think across both our industry and in time where we are right now. Budgets don't work the way they used to. We need to reimagine how we do business. Strategy is quite important. The human element needs to be remembered as technology. I don't want to say pervades because I'm a huge technology fan but you can't lose the humans in the technology. Undergraduates and graduates and faculty still need a human touch in there. And how is that scalable when we're serving thousands of students and hundreds of faculty members? How can our 35 librarians and 75 staff actually reach out and touch? So this year I've been doing strategic planning. I did personal interviews with administrators and then lots of surveying. And so the ability to look forward while still thinking operationally of during the next 12 months, I need to do this. But my budget is this. And how do I connect those two? So finance is important. Please do, even if you don't love math and unfortunate I am a math fan, you need to understand budgets on the practical level. You need to, I think be a champion of people and their development for your own staff, your librarians, the people inside your organization. Look at their, what is your plan and your roadmap, your goals and objectives? How are you gonna get there? Then what are the skills needed to make those succeed or make those goals and just successful? And then what are the competencies that you have right now within your staff? And then what are the gaps? And those gaps are what you need to address in developing your staff or hiring your staff, either making a new staffing plan or if you don't have that opportunity, bringing those skills inside and there's descending people to conferences, there's being active, there's bringing trainers in. So you need to think internally as well as across your organization, whether it be a company or a university or you got romanticized work to Los Alamos and understand their needs and prioritizing. So you can't do everything. And that's probably one of my greatest weaknesses is I want to do everything back to that curiosity. It's a strength, but a little bit of a courage. If you run yourself into the ground, you do need to prioritize. So prioritizing is an important skill. And I've probably already given more skills than you want to cause there. Well, I think that the issue about prioritizing is so important because I think that applies literally to everyone who is looking at how do I contribute at my highest level in the job that I'm currently doing, but then also how do I grow my career? And when those two questions can mesh, that's great. But sometimes you end up having to say for this amount of time, this priority is going to take precedence over everything else that I may want to do or like you say, that I'm things that I'm curious about or I really love to jump in on and learn more about. So prioritizing and sequencing become really important, I would agree, if you are to achieve the goals that you know you need to achieve for your organization. So I found that really helpful. And then I'm gonna follow up with that sort of as a personal question over the course of your career and the many, many, many different kinds of work that you have done. What have you enjoyed the most? I would have to go to Olin College of Engineering. It was a startup school when I got there. I was the first library director they hired. There were only freshmen when I arrived, the first class and I needed to imagine what a new engineering library at a brand new school should look like. The students were all there on scholarship and those early years funding was not the issue which was a beautiful thing. I was able to be super, super creative and really think about what was important. And so engineering students, they're very hands-on. They're making stuff. And so I created the first material samples collection in an engineering library. I believe at that time in the world, there were certainly material samples collections in say architecture libraries or design libraries or design firms, but not in engineering libraries. And so it was a wonderful thing to create. I did this grand road trip of museums and design libraries, architecture firms, other kinds of collections. UMass Amherst had specimens of fish and other creatures that had once been alive and they were all catalogued. And so looking at all of these different types of collections, MIT had quite a remarkable collection of other objects that could circulate and that visited them. And so I created this collection and then we also had a tools collection so students could come in and check out a drill and things like that. So we had a learning objects collection. So we had a lot of structures. You're in the forefront of the Makerspaces initiative and public lovers. Actually, yes, I guess because I'm not sure that there were Makers, I think they began emerging. I was at Olin for 11 years and so they were beginning to emerge at the end of my time, but the ability to really create an interesting space and then also interesting conversations. I brought faculty together from Babson, Olin and Wellesley and we had dialogues that crossed the disciplines. I had a conference that brought computer programmers and publishers and faculty members and students and librarians to talk about the future of publishing and what it meant for tenure and e-books and things like that. I just had, it was a place to be creative and to really stretch and grow. So it was my favorite time as far as that went. The faculty were wildly creative as were the students. It was just a great environment. This is an interesting and very unusual circumstance to be in an academic environment where you are essentially a startup, but that's one of the cool things about being in a startup of any kind, including academia, is that incredible freedom to create, to collaborate, to envision, to ask how could this be? It's very best iteration. So I completely agree with you about how exciting those kinds of opportunities are and just to make clear for students who are listening to this, that doesn't mean that you actually know sort of everything that you're doing when you go into situations like that. That's absolutely correct. It's just sort of taking a leap and saying, I trust that I can bring together the right people. I can ask the right questions and we can find the right answers and solutions. So I love that story, do you? That's wonderful. So... And I'd like to quick footnote that story before you go to your next question because that was perhaps my favorite, although I've had a number, I love my current role, but it followed being laid off. And so I lost a job in Oregon and it was when I was at the advertising agency and it was that 2001.com bubble burst and they just, they closed down the advertising library and I was crushed. I think I probably cried for two weeks and before my husband said, get over yourself. And I did start a company for a while and I ran my own company. And it was actually the startup experience that helped me get the job at Olin College because they wanted someone with entrepreneurship experience in addition to a tech background. And so all of these things came together. So losing a job led me to a rather amazing experience. That is a great point. And also your point about all of these things that don't seem like they would be related to each other. In fact, are the things that come together to make you incredibly well-prepared for the next opportunity that you cannot even anticipate. So... Exactly. I love that. Well, and that gets us to the next question, which is, are there any changes on the horizon that you feel will have a strong impact on the work and or opportunities of information professionals in the coming years? Yes, absolutely. And it's difficult to tie into a neat bundle. But if I began to see it when I was at Los Alamos, we wanted to put together our own taxonomy for the lab. We did such specialized research. And so we kind of put a call out for people with semantics background. There's so many words you could use, ontology, ontological backgrounds. And we came up with people from all over the lab that had never spoken together. It was really quite fascinating. But what was emerging from that group was this need for multimodal. So that goes beyond multimedia. This is modes of content and information. And so it could be an electrical switch or it could be the book on the shelf or an electronic file or an audio clip or a media thing. The content is whatever is necessary to answer a question or probe or do a research project or invent a product. And so I think that multimodal going beyond multimedia is going to be incredibly important whether you're in academia or in corporate or whichever school, public environments. Here at Rutgers, media is an incredibly important delivery mechanism for teaching and student success. However, you have old DVDs, you have CDs, you have streaming media. Everybody wants streaming media. You license it, you buy it, you lose it to the roads. The number of complications around this topic is bringing up preservation questions. The semantics, actually the ontologies are so fun. And so if you like words, this is a wonderful time to I think be in this profession because they're just emerging in so many ways. Creating crosswalks, have an understanding of, at least be able to say what a crosswalk is. Because interoperability, we have all of these systems. You know, you go online and look up college communications and then you come up, they have categories and then within categories, dozens of products and examples. Well, how do you put these together and have them work together? Does this interoperability with these multimodal things and what do you call them, the ontologies, they're all coming together and are super important. And so I think a lot more about that than any book on the shelf these days. And would you say that that applies to data as well as say text or media? Oh, definitely. That's why I think multimedia is such a limiting term. Data is absolutely one of the modes. And yes, we're working with the Office of Research and the equivalent of high performance computing here on data questions and data needs. And what is a data set? Department of Energy defines it one way. Other people have, you know, there's all sorts of ways you can define a data set. So yes, that is absolutely included in there. Okay, that's fascinating, Dee. And actually, that's the first time I have heard the phrase multimodal. So good to know. Well, I could keep you on the podcast with us for the next three hours, but I'll ask you a quick last question, which is what advice would you give students still in grad school in terms of positioning themselves for jobs when they graduate? I would say be open and not just open to different kinds of jobs, but be open to how you position yourself and position your gifts. Everybody has a different background and can put those strengths together in a unique way. There are opportunities for people in our profession in so many places. And I would strongly encourage people to just think broadly and read broadly because you find opportunities where you would never, ever expect them. And I've told my LinkedIn success story before, I had to photo shoot done, redid my profile, made sure I had presentations and titles and the active with associations do that, all those things up to date. And two weeks later, I was contacted by Los Alamos to please apply for a position. So how you position yourself and thinking broadly are very important traits. I would have never seen a Los Alamos position. I just had no clue it was open. So put yourself out there, I guess. Become visible. Yes, yes. Interesting. All right, well Dee, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I really, really appreciate it. I would encourage everyone listening to take a look at Dee's LinkedIn profile because it actually is one of the ones that I use when I teach LinkedIn webinars for excellence. And I would hope that we all get to have as broad and deep and rewarding and high impact, a career with our LIS skills as you have had with yours, Dee. And again, thank you. And with that, I will end our meeting. Thank you.