As a trusted leader in the democratization of knowledge, the Library makes information accessible in order to inspire innovation, foster critical inquiry and advocate for social justice. Meet Karen Heskett and Gen Thipatima, two Library employees whose work closely supports student research, advocacy and engagement in unique ways.
Gen Thipatima ’18 (she/they)
Engagement and Assessment Supervisor
Tell us about how your work supports student advocacy and activism. My work is driven by user feedback. Each academic year, my team conducts over a dozen assessments about Library spaces and services. We engage with the Library Student Advisory Council (LSAC), which provides feedback and insights from a student perspective. For example, users have long been asking for more meditation or quiet spaces in the Library. Last year’s LSAC cohort provided great ideas of what a Library meditation room could look like. We have since incorporated their feedback and have organized additional user assessments as we plan for this forthcoming space.
Tell us about some of the programs you manage at the Library. My team manages the quarterly therapy dog visits in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Love on a Leash. Pet therapy at the Library was constantly requested via our student feedback forms, and it has been growing in popularity on campus. The series is one of our most successful offerings. We welcome more than 180 students per 90-minute dog therapy session. Fortunately, we were able to expand this activity at the start of the academic year and now offer more sessions for both students and Library staff.
I also introduced the weekly publication of online de-stress materials for students. Created during the height of the pandemic, I worked with our student employees to develop self-care and wellness content. This was a timely solution to our inability to host in-person activities. Our team’s student employees designed coloring pages, Sudoku puzzles, word puzzles and inspirational quote graphics. I was delighted to see content from the publication was featured in the San Diego Public Library’s Summer Reading Room activity book in August 2020. We have also moved some of the archived content to the new De-Stress LibGuide, which connects users to wellness resources in the Library and across campus.
What are you most proud to have accomplished within your work at the Library? I am so proud of creating the Virtual Library Tour in Winter Quarter 2020. During the production stages, I learned how to use a 360-degree camera and how to leverage a tour creation platform. While putting together the captions, I became much more familiar with the Library website, services and spaces. The tour was shared with individuals who could not visit Geisel Library in person during the pandemic and is now used for virtual orientations.
Is there anything else you would like to share about the work you do? I hope to create the expectation that the Library is more than just a place to cram for exams. I want users to know that Library staff cares deeply about their success. We sincerely listen to student feedback on what we can improve, change or add to our offerings to support them. I am genuinely grateful to have the guidance and support to try new things and implement activities and services that make a difference for our users.
Contact Gen: gthipati@ucsd.edu
Karen Heskett (she/her)
Subject Specialist Librarian for Medicine and Systematic Review Service Coordinator
Tell us about your role and what excites you most about your work. As a subject specialist librarian, I offer instruction in various areas, which serves as my creative outlet and allows me to connect with students. I specialize in providing reference support in the areas of medicine and public health, but I also assist with general reference. I support our researchers in several other ways, including helping with citation management, navigating National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy compliance and assisting with systematic reviews.
How does your work support student research? I work with multiple academic programs that offer historically underrepresented students a chance to gain enhanced research skills in an effort to increase equity. During each session, I provide individualized assistance to students who need guidance on their research.
How do you collaborate with other campus departments to provide research support? I am proud to partner with Georgia Sadler, Professor Emeritus at UC San Diego School of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and past Associate Director for Community Outreach at Moores Cancer Center. For many years, she has run NIH grant-funded summer programs for underrepresented students in research. Together, we host a series of four workshops that provide students with in-depth instruction on best practices for conducting research. We share tools students can use to stay current on their research topics and cover subjects such as how to get and stay organized, including how to use Zotero (a free online tool that helps collect, organize, annotate, cite and share research). The final workshop in the series focuses on creating scholarly posters. We help students revise abstracts and create posters that are exhibited at a professional cancer education conference.
What are you most proud to have accomplished within your work at the Library? I am the team coordinator for our Systematic Review Service, a comprehensive literature review that gathers all available evidence matching pre-specified criteria to answer a specific research question. Collectively, our team has impacted several academic programs, but most importantly, we have made remarkable strides in helping with patient care research.
You were nominated for the American Library Association’s annual I Love My Librarian Award in recognition for teaching scholarly poster workshops. What do you find most fulfilling about this work? The creativity and ingenuity of the students. When the students start creating posters to showcase their research, I get to witness first-hand how they apply what we covered throughout the course of the workshop. We start with the basics on how to create the poster (in PowerPoint or Google Slides), then they get to add their own personality and flare to it. Seeing how they evolve their work and turn it into a creative representation of themselves and their project is impressive.
Contact Karen: kheskett@ucsd.edu
The article above originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Explore magazine, the Library’s signature publication. Read the full issue online here.