News Library News Online
Vol. 23, No. 2/Winter 2001

Table of Contents
Regular Features

New This Month

News Library News
SLA News Division Home

 

New members introduce themselves

 

Robby Grant

I have been a member of the News Division in the past when I worked at Maclean's and The Financial Times here in Canada. I have been working for the last seven years for an investigative company which has recently been taken over by Kroll Associates. I have decided to rejoin SLA to keep on top of new information sources and I know that if anyone knows where to find information, it is news librarians. 


 

Joel Minion
Librarian, Pacific Newspaper Group
Vancouver, British Columbia

Joel Minion

No one is more surprised to be a member of the SLA News Division than I am.

I completed my MLIS degree in 1993 at the University of Western Ontario, and subsequently went to work in the public library sector. A couple of years later, realizing that this career path was likely to become largely administrative, I resigned and moved to Vancouver.

There I became a freelance/contract librarian for a wide variety of projects connected to the arrival of the Internet in public and special libraries. For over four years, I had a hand in everything from delivering training workshops, to developing Web sites, to coordinating a Web-based distance education program. All in all, it was a great and varied experience.

But by mid-2000 I knew I needed to try something new. When the librarian position came up at the Pacific Newspaper Group, I hesitated about returning to an employee status again, but applied anyway. Right through the interview process, I was very unsure about such a change. Then I had a tour of the newsrooms and knew that I had finally found a purpose for all of those bits of trivia I'd stored in my head for years.

Three months on and the job is terrific. This position involves three main activities: reference for the newsrooms, management of our contributions to the Infomart Dialog database, and staff/newsroom training. My biggest hope now is to know the answer to a question posed on the News Division listserv.