At the Library, we have hundreds of employees who want nothing more than to make it easy for students, faculty and researchers to access materials whenever and wherever they need them. Meet two such individuals, Jenn Dandle and Kirk Wang. Both exemplify what it means to be a dedicated library professional eager to share the vast knowledge in our holdings with fellow Tritons and the world.
Jenn Dandle, Web Manager
Describe your role at the Library. What are your primary responsibilities?
As web manager at the Library, I provide strategic support for the Library’s public web presence to create a more consistent user experience across multiple disparate products. My responsibilities vary greatly depending on the scope and needs of a project. I often serve in project manager, technician or expert advisor roles.
Why do you have a passion for working in a library?
I am passionate about working in a library because I believe the overall mission of libraries as stewards of information is invaluable to society. Knowledge is power, and access to information fuels and supports that knowledge. I enjoy having the opportunity to work in an environment where the improvements I support have far-reaching benefits.
How does your role help our students achieve their academic goals?
Making the Library’s website and supporting systems more usable and more accessible are two primary goals for my role as web manager. We want to make it quick and easy for students to learn about and gain access to resources to help them excel academically. For example, the Library updated the study room reservation system this summer to allow students to more easily reserve a room.
What do you love most about your job?
One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is being able to help technicians and content creators make the web more accessible for all, regardless of ability. I enjoy breaking down complex issues and finding creative solutions to improve usability.
What is one of the favorite projects you’ve had the opportunity to work on since you’ve been at the Library?
I’ve been lucky enough to work on many fun projects—it’s hard to pick just one! I’m grateful I had the opportunity to participate in the transition to the new UC Library Search. Moving from a traditional catalog system to a discovery tool revolutionizes the experience for students, faculty and staff and makes it easier for them to find materials they wouldn’t have had direct access to from the previous catalog.
What is one surprising fact about yourself that most people do not know?
Most people don’t know that I play sled hockey with the San Diego Ducks. Every week, I’m counting down to Saturday morning for weekly practice with the team. I enjoy being active and continuing to push my limits. A phrase often heard around the rink is “hockey is for everyone.”
Contact Jenn: jdandle@ucsd.com
Kirk Wang, Scholarship Tools and Methods Specialist
Describe your role at the Library. What are your primary responsibilities?
I work in Scholarship Tools and Methods (STM) and am primarily responsible for still-image reformatting and making sure content is archived in our digital collections, including video content from the Library’s signature Holocaust Living History Workshop series. I also help manage our department’s student workers.
What do you love most about your job?
It’s hard to choose what I love most, but completing projects or a digitization request and seeing patrons getting use out of the work my colleagues and I have produced is very satisfying. I also love when the students I manage graduate and want to pursue a career in the library field.
What do you enjoy about working at the Library?
At the Library, I really enjoy fulfilling digitization requests—not just in-house needs, but also inquiries we receive from faculty. Being in the library field, I appreciate the searching for and sharing of information. If I could go back and tell my undergrad self one thing, it would be ‘use course reserves!’ I remember buying all my books that I only used for a quarter, some of which weren’t even a part of my major.
How does your role help our students achieve their academic goals?
I digitize materials needed for research and make them accessible so patrons don’t necessarily have to come into the Library to view them. I think the increased accessibility helps students and faculty, especially in this changing educational landscape during the pandemic.
What is one of the favorite projects you’ve had the opportunity to work on since you’ve been at the Library?
I really enjoyed working on the San Diego Chinese Newspapers project, which has made us the only library on the West Coast to hold the bound volumes and the first to provide digitized copies of the newspaper. The materials were donated to Special Collections & Archives by the Avery-Tsui Foundation with encouragement from UC San Diego Foundation Trustee and alumna Sally WongAvery and her daughter Natasha Wong. Due to a compressed timeline driven by scholarly needs, we expedited the process by outsourcing the work to a vendor in Los Angeles called Luna Imaging. Before making the images available to the public, my team and I were responsible for quality control and reviewed the digital scans from the vendor to ensure all 12,554 pages were up to our Library’s digitization standards. It was a wild experience seeing the ads of Asian San Diego businesses from the 1980s and 1990s.
What is one surprising fact about yourself that most people do not know?
I think a good amount of people know that I am in the Army Reserves, but very few people know that as of September 17, 2021, I have been in the Reserves for 20 years. I joined right after 9/11 and can’t believe it’s been that long.
Contact Kirk: k2wang@ucsd.com
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Explore magazine, the Library’s signature biannual publication. Read the full issue online here.