Emerging Leader

Greetings from RUSA’s 2016 Emerging Leader

I consider myself an expert email watcher. Of course in October 2015 my iPhone Mail app just about had enough of my checking and refreshing. But all for a very good reason! The phrase “Congratulations!” had never meant so much to me as it did when I opened the Emerging Leaders email with that exact phrase. I will admit I had to read that email a few times just for it to sink in and then I could celebrate.

My name is Catherine Damiani and I am honored to be RUSA’s 2016 Emerging Leader. I recently graduated from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Library and Information Studies and currently work as East Providence Public Library’s full-time Digital Services Librarian. I was introduced to RUSA when I was a library school student through ALA’s Student-to-Staff program at ALA Annual in 2014. I was very lucky to have experienced working with such a fantastic organization through the S2S program. I continued working with RUSA as a Voices blogger during ALA Annual 2015 and became very interested in serving on RUSA committees during that time. Within RUSA, I currently serve on the President’s Program Planning Committee and the ETS Hot Topics in Electronic Reference Discussion Group. My involvement with RUSA and ALA as a whole has lent an enormous amount of experience and value to my professional career. I am so excited to be serving RUSA in this capacity.

To give you a little background: the Emerging Leaders program was developed to help new librarians hone leadership skills and work with other librarians from around the country on projects for the American Library Association. This year’s fifty Emerging Leaders will be working on projects for AASL, ACRL, ALA-APA, ALCTS, ALSC, APALA, IRRT, MAGIRT, PLA, YALSA, and of course RUSA.

Last year’s RUSA Emerging Leader, Beth Boatright, worked on the RUSA “Library as Publisher” project. I am thrilled that myself and 4 other Emerging Leaders will be continuing this project and developing a toolkit for libraries interested in publishing. After our day-long workshop at ALA Midwinter in Boston I am confident when I say that the RUSA project project team is a dream team and that we are all incredibly excited to be working on this project.

Stay tuned for more updates as I will be posting to both RUSA Updates and RUSA News during my time as RUSA’s Emerging Leader. I also love to tweet and if you do too be sure to connect with me on Twitter @BiblioCatherine.

Catherine Damiani