Like Aja, I have Hawaiian connections -- my son went to library school at UH Manoa and now lives in Honolulu and works for the public library system. That gives me the excuse to visit Hawaii as often as possible!

My geographic background includes most of the country -- I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in Madison, New Jersey, and Bethesda, Maryland. I attended the American University in D.C. and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, more years ago than I like to remember with a degree in German. Through a series of fortuitous events, my husband and I ended up in Alaska. We were so overwhelmed by its beauty and vastness that we decided to stay "just for a couple of years". 31 years later we are still here, so I guess this is home now, although my husband hales from Montana, and we spend a lot of time there too.

I have worked in public libraries for most of my career with brief stints in a military library and at the University of Alaska library. My career has been in two parts -- the first for four years in the early 70s, resuming in the early 80s after my two children entered school. In the years between, I was active in library advocacy through our Friends of the Library. I did not become an "official" librarian until 1994 after earning my MLS from the University of Arizona, but I have had interesting job responsibilities both before and after becoming "degreed". For several years I managed a books-by-mail program that served people living in places even MORE remote than most of those Aja visits. I could also add to the "bush" stories, since I had a lively correspondence with library patrons all the way out to the Aleutians. We did remote reference service in Alaska long before the arrival of the Internet!

The Juneau Public Libaries (one main, three branches) are small enough that we all have multiple responsibilities. Among mine are reference, municipal documents, the E-rate process, grants, and the Foundation Center cooperating collection. My chief responsibility is managing our city's Internet project and serving as webmaster for our city website (www.juneau.org). I head a team including a programmer and a web designer to get city publications online. What began as a simple brochure site is now essentially the GPO for our city. All documents appear online as well as in paper and the site exceeds 500MB in size and receives 3 million hits per quarter. My role is to coordinate the activities of city departments, to train them, to try to apply standard organizing and indexing principles to the site, and to produce and maintain the historical and community information on the website.

My leisure interests include gardening (in Juneau this means just learning to appreciate whatever survives the rain, slugs, and deer), travel (reading, planning, doing), trying to keep current with foreign languages (German, Spanish), birdwatching, and spending time outside on the water, and in the woods. My husband and I have two grown sons, a Samoyed, a Westie, and a large black cat.

I am looking forward to meeting everyone at the Institute and thinking about all the ways libraries and our profession will be changing next!

Barbara G. Berg
Electronic Services Librarian
Juneau Public Libraries
and Webmaster, The Capital City Home Page
http://www.juneau.org
Phone: (907)586-0442
Fax: (907)586-5383

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