The Bookshare Team Expands

By Ann Harrison

Bookshare added two key members to its team this winter. We are pleased to introduce Betsy Beaumon and Amy McNeely who both play important roles in the continuing expansion of the Bookshare library.

Betsy Beaumon is the new Vice President and General Manager of the Benetech Literacy Program which includes both Bookshare and the Route 66 Literacy project. Beaumon is responsible for directing all aspects of Bookshare operations, marketing and engineering. She manages Bookshare’s external relationships and partnerships to assure that Bookshare offers its members the highest quality digital texts.

Beaumon served for more than twenty years as technology executive and entrepreneur. She is a former Senior Director for BEA Systems, Inc. and managed international e-business initiatives for Cisco Systems, Inc. In 1995, Beaumon founded Social Online Service, the first web-based information and referral service for social service organizations. As Executive Director of the company, Beaumon was an early supporter of web accessibility standards. Beaumon was also one of the founders of TradeBeam Inc., a provider of global trade management software services.

Beaumon earned a BSEE from Northwestern University. She has an extensive background in operations, marketing, product management, implementation services, training and strategic partnerships. Active in volunteer work, Beaumon taught English classes to adult students in Tanzania last year.

Amy McNeely is Bookshare’s new librarian. McNeely’s first major task is updating the subject headings assigned to books in Browse: Categories. McNeely is also creating a collection development plan for Bookshare to acquire new books, especially books for student members. She will advise Bookshare on library procedure and policies and conduct research and reference for other staff members. McNeely will also reach out to other librarians who don’t yet know about Bookshare and encourage them to get involved with the Bookshare library.

"Bookshare will still set itself apart by being a library for the people, by the people, and we will continue to follow a volunteer scanning model in conjunction with scanning and data acquisition from publishers," said McNeely.

McNeely has been working in libraries since 2000 and has a career certificate in library technology from Sacramento City College. She received her Master’s Degree of Library and Information Science from UCLA in 2006. She was a National Library of Medicine Fellow from 2006-2007, and then went on to work at the NYU School of Medicine Ehrman Medical Library as the metadata librarian until the end of 2008.

McNeely notes that metadata is simply information about information. Examples include tables of contents, subjects, ISBNs, track names in iTunes, the date a Microsoft Word Document was last saved, and all the tags added in Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. All of the information on a book description page in Bookshare is metadata, including the title, synopsis, book quality, and so forth.

Here are some unusual librarian duties that McNeely has tackled:

• Research on hallucinogenic toads while at the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs.
• Holding Jack Benny’s pipe while working in an archive at UCLA.
• Missing a car blow up while working at the Fox Studios library. "They blew up the Chevy Tahoe while I was looking at the Suburban!" said McNeely. She did see Hugh Laurie from the TV program "House" that day, so it wasn’t a total wash.
• Participation in a class project which created a basic catalog for a California Youth Authority facility so they could finally lend their books out to the kids.
• Cataloging medical pamphlets published before 1900. "Thank goodness," says McNeely, "for medical miracles that upgraded us from ether and the saw!"

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