In recognition of National Library Week (April 6-12), we’re highlighting just a few of the librarians that make up a fantastic team of staff who keep our libraries running. Esther Jackson, Scholarly Communications Technologies Librarian, shares how expanding public access to information has been the foundational goal of her career as a librarian and describes how her day-to-day work at Columbia University Libraries supports that mission. 

Q: What is your role in the Libraries?
Esther: I’m the Scholarly Communications Technologies Librarian, part of the Open Scholarship Services team.

Q: What does your typical day entail?
Esther: One thing I like about my job—which is probably true for a lot of library workers—is that each day is different. I’m one of the library staff members responsible for Academic Commons, the Columbia digital repository, the Journal Publishing partnerships program, and the Podcast Publishing partnerships program (say that one five times fast). This means that I answer reference and support questions from Columbia affiliates who are digitally publishing content through our platforms, as well as outside users who have questions about these collections and programs. A typical day usually starts with email triage, which leads into meetings about the various projects I am working on and the systems I am helping to support. I am a supervisor in the Digital Internships Program and work closely with students to add new content to our collections, remediate metadata issues, and support users. As one of the Columbia Libraries staff who provides instruction, I lead workshops such as those in our Strategies for Publishing Success series. I also field questions related to our open access publishing agreements, contribute to the assessment of those agreements, and provide consultations on any number of topics related to digital publishing. On days when I have fewer meetings, I do what might be called data science work in other industries—collecting and transforming bibliographic metadata about digitally published materials, either for the purposes of depositing them in Academic Commons or to perform further analysis.

Q: What originally inspired you to become a librarian?
Esther: Something my colleagues have heard me say in the past is that “I came for the books and stayed for the information systems.” I was a voracious reader as a child and always wanted to be a librarian. At my public library, I was allowed to check out whatever books I wanted. This made an especially lasting impression, as it allowed for me to expand my worldview and knowledge beyond my suburban town, religious community, and the syllabi of my K-12 classes. Expanding public access to information has been the foundational goal of my career as a librarian, the seeds for which were planted by the public librarian who asked the ten-year-old me if I had already read the John Irving novel I was impulsively checking out.

Q: What is the most rewarding part of working at the Libraries?
Esther: Working with students is probably the most rewarding part of my job. I love to supervise students and collaborate with them on interesting technical or research projects. I also enjoy teaching students (and anyone who is interested) about open scholarship topics such as digital publishing, persistent identifiers, and metadata. The students I interact with almost always have thoughtful questions and creative ideas—and very ambitious, scholarship-bending projects that I love to learn about.

Q: What’s the best kept secret about Columbia’s libraries?
Esther: This is a tough question for me to answer! My experience is that we don’t intentionally keep services or collections secret in the Columbia Libraries. That said, I’m not sure that everyone knows about the fact that the Columbia Libraries pays for Data Dryad, which is a platform that allows for the Columbia affiliates to publish public data sets up to 300GB in size. We also have a number of agreements with publishers that allow for Columbia affiliates to publish open access articles with no article processing charges (APCs). These are both really great resources for students and early-career researchers who may not have access to as much funding to support the publishing of their research.

Q: Give a shout-out to a fellow librarian for National Library Week! Which Columbia librarian(s) help make your day-to-day work enjoyable?
Esther: I am fortunate in that I work with a lot of wonderful people, but I have to shout out Kathryn Pope in particular. We work closely together on a lot of projects and complement each other’s strengths really well. It’s a delight to work with Kathryn almost every day!