Librarian Avengers

I’m Erica Olsen. I was born in Flint, MI.

I live in San Francisco, CA.

I live in San Francisco, CA. I am a User Experience Designer for Second Life.

I moved here in June of 2007. Before that I worked for the World’s Largest Collection of Animal Recordings at Cornell University.

I have a Master’s in Information Science, and a B.A. in English. I also have a Master Beekeeper Certification from Cornell’s agricultural extension. Guess which one I’m most proud of?

Librarian Avengers started in 1997

Librarian Avengers started in 1997. In Internet time, that’s about 50 years ago. I was a young English Major when I wrote an essay called Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian and hooked it up to the domain name I got for my birthday. The response from the library community (around 30 emails/day ) was one of the forces that propelled me into graduate school.

I learned to steal free food from SIG-CHI meetings

I blogged grad school, where I learned to steal free food from SIG-CHI meetings, studied Human-computer Interaction, and joined the Community Information Corps. I made some t-shirts, learned to code, and now there’s this.

This site uses WordPress, and a custom template based on FastTrack. The name Librarian Avengers was adapted from the Lesbian Avengers, a group of activists whose hellraising I admire. I learned about them as an undergrad working at Michigan State University’s American Radicalism collection.

I owe that library many great things, including my love of comics, my first Cutter table, several Professional Heroes, and the chance to hold a first edition copy of The House on Pooh Corner.

*Saying “I am a librarian” is like saying “Please, remove $80,000 from my paycheck” so let’s keep the librarian thing between you and me. Seriously. This profession is rough.

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