Institutional Library Services

Sheryl, a long time employee with Washington State Library and the Twin Rivers Unit of the Monroe Correctional Complex is retiring. She will be leaving the the library after 15 years and 5 months with the inmates at Twin Rivers. Sheryl is a woman of amazing energy that has been put to use running the Twin Rivers library and teaching the inmates part time in the education department. Where she gets the energy I will never know. Her dedication to her work is amazing and she will be sorely missed by all of us in the Institutional Library community.

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Working in a prison library one of the demands on our time is the requests for information about release addresses. As each inmate must have a confirmed and acceptable address to release to and their time gets near it is a major concern. However, it is only recently that we have been providing a much more extensive aspect of this service. We know have forms that can be filled out and then we do a computer search on a database using the criteria that is listed by the inmate.

I was recently sent this article on the City Librarian of Seattle and found it very intersting. The item that hit me especially, working here in a prison library is the comment about "libraries have absorbed overflow responsibilities from social service agencies and schools" which is true for many libraries including prison libraries.

This is my favorite website for answering all the questions we get about bands and artists. I love all the links within the pages that let you easily explore "meaningful connections between artists and the music," such as learning more about individual artists who have side projects or have been part of multiple groups, or finding music that is similar to bands you know you like. It also includes historical information and extensive genre tagging. I've looked up some pretty obscure artists here, and there is always an entry. Information is current, and I've never noticed an error.

It was the summer of 1973 when I was hired among a pool of teenagers to work in the Patients Library in the original Madigan Army Hospital near Fort Lewis. There were three full-time librarians that interviewed and hired me. All three made a lifelong lasting impression. But the one who wafts in and out of my memory like a sweet fragrance is Mrs. Roberts. The head librarian was Mrs. Bruns. Mrs. Bruns was the only daughter of a wealthy family. Her childhood stories were ones of exotic travels and adventures, with personal servants.

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