Bio & Headshot
Short bio: Jessamyn West is a librarian and community technologist who lives in Central Vermont.
Longer bio: Jessamyn West is a library technologist from Randolph Vermont. She is a nationally known speaker, writer, and educator on the issues facing
today's libraries. Her blog focusing on libraries and politics, Librarian.net, is one of the earliest and longest running librarian websites. She writes a column for Computers in Libraries magazine and is the author of the book Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. She has taught "Tools for Community Advocacy" for the University of Hawaii's Library School and was on the Advisory Board to the Wikimedia Foundation. As a librarian without a library, for the past fifteen years she has spent most of her time working with her local community as a hands-on technology educator.
Formal bio: Jessamyn West of Randolph is a consultant, researcher and international public speaker on library science and digital divide issues. She is the author of a 2011 book Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide which explores the challenges of a society becoming stratified by computer skills as well as race and income inequality. Jessamyn speaks to local, regional, and national libraries and library associations and is a regular Computers in Libraries columnist writing on these and other issues relating to the status and roles of libraries in the modern changing world. She has put her skills to good use for fifteen years teaching basic technology classes at Randolph Technical Career Center's adult education program. In addition to being a community technologist and writer, she has taught Community Engagement at University Of Hawai'i at Manoa's Library & Information Science Program, and is the technology coordinator for the Vermont Library Association (VLA). She created the "Passport to Vermont Libraries" program and was the recipient of VLA's Library Advocate of the Year Award in 2016, and was recently a Fellow at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab. She holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MLib. from the University of Washington.