Friedman elected new RUSA president

Contact: Cathleen Bourdon


312-280-4395


cbourdon@ala.org

ALA News Release


For Immediate Release


August 2000

Friedman elected new RUSA president

Catherine R. Friedman, head of the Dewey Library for Management and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the new president of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). She assumed office in July.

“I plan to help RUSA take a leadership role in developing a vision for the future of reference and user services,” said Friedman. Friedman added that during her presidency she would focus on membership recruitment and retention, the development of useful professional opportunities and making sure RUSA is organizationally effective and provides members with an evolving package of needed services and support.

Friedman has served as head of the general reference division and as business reference librarian at San Diego State University. Friedman also worked as a reference librarian/business subject specialist and as head of the Bimson Library at Arizona State University, Tempe. She was also the librarian-in-charge/exchange librarian at the Chambers Street Library, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland.

An active RUSA member, Friedman has served as chair of the Reference Tools Advisory Committee, the Business Reference and Services Section (BRASS), and co-chairs the BRASS/Library Services for Distance Education Guidelines Committee.

Friedman is the author of “Commodity Prices: A Sourcebook and Index Providing References to Wholesale, Retail, and Other Quotations for More Than 10,000 Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Consumer Products,” and with Kelly Janousek, “Small Business, Big Challenge: The Vocabulary of Small Business and the Entrepreneur.”

She received the 2000 Gale Group Award for Excellence in Business Librarianship for her contributions as an administrator, author, consultant, mentor, practitioner and contributor to professional associations.

Friedman has a bachelor's degree in political science and economics and a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

RUSA is devoted to supporting the delivery of reference/information services to all groups and general library services to adults. Its 5,000 members represent all types of libraries.