Early Life and Career
West grew up in Massachusetts, where her father, computer engineer Tom West, worked for RCA and Data General. (He was the key figure in the 1981 Tracy Kidder book The Soul of a New Machine.) She may be named after the author Jessamyn West (according to her parents, a "coincidence"), and as a child corresponded with her. She is also the niece of actor Peter Coyote.
She graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst and moved to Seattle in 1990. In 1995, she went to Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where she ran a library for the Freedom Forum. After returning to the U.S. she completed graduate work at the University of Washington for a Master of Librarianship degree.
She has lived in Vermont since 2003. She works as a freelance library consultant, mainly in Orange County, Vermont, focusing on helping libraries with technology. She is a paid employee and moderator for the group blog MetaFilter, and answers as many as two questions a day on the question-and-answer subforum Ask MetaFilter. She is also an active Wikipedian, working particularly on Vermont and library topics. In June 2011 she joined the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board. She has staffed information desks at Burning Man and the 1999 WTO protests, and served as a judge for ThinkQuest.
West briefly signed up as a researcher for Google Answers, writing about her experience for the journal Searcher. (She resigned after finding she had probably violated her contract by writing about the service.) West believed that "the money factor" skewed the relationship between the researcher and consumer of information, and played a part in the service's later demise.
West is considered an "opinion maker" in the profession and presents frequently at conferences. In 2002, Library Journal named her among a "mover and shaker" of the library world. She is a self-described anti-capitalist.
Read more about this topic: Jessamyn West (librarian)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)