Featured WAML Member for September: Jim O'Donnell

Where did you go to college?

I went to Cal (UC Berkeley). When I graduated in 1975, I loaded up all my earthly belongings and drove to Los Angeles to get my MLS at UCLA.

Where was your first job working with maps?

The UCLA Geology-Geophysics Library. Actually I didn’t really work with them: I kind of watched other people work with them, and then hired other people to work with them. The first time I really got my mitts on a map collection was when I moved to Caltech in1986. It was heaven.

Do you have a favorite map?

I sure do: Geologic map of the Mt. Wilson and Azusa quadrangles, Los Angeles County, California / by Thomas W. Dibblee, Jr., 1998; edited by Helmut E. Ehrenspeck Dibblee Geological Foundation map ; no. DF-67

Two reasons: It’s local, and beautiful (that’s one reason). The other is that when I was organizing the WAML@30 conference in 1997, I got the Executive Board to help celebrate by donating $1000 to support its publication, and naming it the “Stanley D. Stevens Honorary Map”. Stan Stevens was the most helpful person I ever met in map librarianship (and most of you know that that says a lot!) He shepherded me through getting Caltech back on the USGS depository list, and answered untold numbers of questions. I grew to understand that that’s what Map Librarians do: help each other - but nobody did it like Stan.
View a photo of Stan (on the right) being presented the map by the late Helmut Ehrenspeck.

What’s the most fun you ever had at a WAML conference?

Driving in Grand Teton National Park, in the snow, under a full moon, turning out the headlights, driving by the (brilliant) light of the moon.

Photo of Jim and Sylvia Bender at the conference in Hawaii in 1992.
From Pikes Peak, 1999, Jim and the "Californios". (He's in the middle)

What do you like to do when you aren’t being a map librarian?

I love to read (see below), cook, and catalog my library on LibraryThing.com.  If I could, I’d spend months in England and elsewhere in Europe every year.

What book(s) are you reading these days?

“Bangkok 8” by John Burdett, and “S is for Silence” by Sue Grafton.  Actually, I just finished those, and recommend both highly.  I’m now working on Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Gold Coast” (book 2 of his Three Californias series) and “At Swim, Two Boys” by Jamie O’Neill.

What is your least favorite thing to do at work?

Keep my desk  -- or any flat surface in its vicinity -- clear.

And what's your favorite thing to do at work?

Dig around on the web to discover maps that USGS hasn’t bothered to send on depository, and order them.  (Small pleasures!!)