Susan Logan retires
Susan ends her long career with the OSU Libraries on December 22. She came to The Ohio State University as an undergraduate, completing a B.S. in Home Economics in 1962. After completing an MLS at the University of Western Ontario (1970), Susan joined University Libraries as General Librarian and Supervisor of the Shelf List Conversion Unit, Cataloguing Information Systems Librarian and Instructor, Research and Development (1970-71). Her career here included: Information Specialist and Instructor, Mechanized Information Center (1973-78); Coordinator of Automated Library Systems (1978-99); and Head of the Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Library (1999-present). Susan was promoted to Assistant Professor (1984) and Associate Professor (1999).
Susan coordinated the work required to take the Library Control System (LCS) from an online circulation system to a full blown catalog containing serial holdings, full bibliographic records, and authority control. Because LCS was a homegrown system, written by several programmers at OIT, Susan had the ongoing responsibility of working with the programmers and others in the library to design new system functions, write specifications, and test and implement system changes. LCS was one of the earliest online catalogs, so the pioneer efforts led by Susan were of much interest to the profession. Susan’s success in enhancing LCS step by step, to the point where it could serve as OSU’s public access catalog, allowed OSU to close the card catalog before other libraries were ready to take that step. Similarly, Susan was responsible for coordinating OSU’s OhioLINK implementation, again a pioneer effort. The idea of the OhioLINK consortium and a central catalog that supported patron-initiated online borrowing was completely new, and Susan participated in writing the RFP specifications and in selecting a vendor (III) to fulfill them. She also coordinated several major initiatives that had to be completed at OSU to get us ready to join OhioLINK. Many people carried out the projects but Susan had the responsibility of coordinating everything and making sure that it got done in time.
The online catalog was the primary technology focus for much of Susan’s career, but she was responsible for other “firsts” as well — the development of the grant funded Gateway to Information, for which Susan was a project manager; the pre-Web online delivery of locally mounted reference databases; the transition from public terminals to networked public computers; the implementation of BuckID printing; support for creation of OSUL’s initial Web presence; and the expansion of the Automation Office to include staff other than Susan herself.
Those of us who were here working with her can appreciate the significance of her accomplishments and the dedication and hard work it took for her to achieve them. Susan’s persistent intellectual curiosity has served OSU well, enabling her to envision new directions and to build relationships with colleagues, such as those at OIT, to help us move in those directions. (Reprinted from OSU Libraries’ News Notes, December 19, 2006)
December 21st, 2006
