BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
You may never have met Alice Kawakami. But you
might recognize her online persona as the research librarian
who thoughtfully analyzed your problem and patiently guided
you through the labyrinth of databases and Web links available
from the UCLA Library.
Program director for digital reference, Kawakami
and her team of 30 librarians are the behind-the-screen experts
for “Online Librarian,” a service offering UCLA
faculty, staff and students instant help Mondays through Fridays
via the Web.
Using customized software, a librarian can chat
with a user in one box that pops up on-screen while simultaneously
pulling up Web sites or any of UCLA’s 120-plus available
online databases in another box on the same screen. Librarian
and user share the same screen view of both boxes. When the
session ends, a complete transcript of their chat is automatically
e-mailed to the user.
With this new tool, reference librarians can
do more than look up information; they can now teach users how
to search online. For her work in developing and implementing
the service, Kawakami was named the 2002 Librarian of the Year
by the Librarians Association of the University of California,
Los Angeles.
“When we first started thinking about
this two years ago, we thought it would be particularly helpful
to students living in the residence halls or to people who were
working somewhere in the library,” said Kawakami, who
is also assistant head of College Library. But requests pour
in from UCLA graduate students doing field work in Bogota, faculty
working at home and students who are sitting across from a live
reference librarian.
Kawakami started working at the UCLA Library
in 1991 as a student reference desk assistant at Powell Library
while attending graduate school.
A former computer programmer, Kawakami didn’t
start thinking about a library career until her children were
grown, although she had always worked at her children’s
school libraries as a volunteer. One day she heard about an
innovation: Library catalogues were going online.
“I thought, ‘What a perfect marriage
of technology, libraries and information,’ all of which
I was interested in,” said Kawakami, who enrolled in UCLA’s
graduate school in library science.
She’s been at the forefront of such innovations
ever since, making UCLA the first UC campus to launch an online
reference service. “The more people who know about this
service, the better,” said Kawakami, who noted that the
State Library of California has just decided to use the software.
“The more people use this service, the more we can expand
it.”
