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)
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