Christine DeZelar-Tiedman is currently working at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities as their Cataloging Policies and Practices Librarian. She knew leaving our MLIS program in 1994 that cataloging was where her heart belonged, finding a job after graduation at the University of Idaho and staying there for five years before finding her current position. Her favorite part of her job right now is getting to still work in the catalogs, finding herself still learning from the collections she aids in and oversees. She has managed to resist the admin track, learning through interim positions that the collection is still where she belongs, and finding a rare blend of her interests in her current position, where she still gets to work on policy and use her experience as a resource, without management.

She loves cataloging, because “in my small little corner of the world, I get to give order to chaos. Even though the systems we enforce are artificial, we get to give meaning to things by cataloging them and thinking them through.” She also weighed the importance of the catalog; “in cataloging, we must account for our biases, there is no neutrality. Our awareness, where accounted for in our cataloging choices, is how we do the least harm.”

Christine is also finishing up her three year elected term on the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, aiding in training librarians and supporting library documentation of adherence to RDA standards. She was also involved in their task group on AI, attempting to create guiding principles and best practices for catalogs to follow, holding many ethical reservations. A common thread in her career has been that as new tech develops, she helps develop and support the standards of the field. She says she likes to “get her hands dirty” with policy to “help others along.” 

Her advice to new library professionals had to do with flexibility. She believes that success “is part your own doing, and part luck,” and there is some importance in being flexible with your first position. While not everyone is capable of being flexible geographically, being flexible with the types of position you're open to, and what sort of library, can help you find something new that you might also love. She views this kind of open mindedness as an extension of life long learning, and a leg-up against the current job market.