I suspect people think that we have staff here looking through catalogs and buying books all day long. That hasn't happened in a really long time.
- Name
- Liz Mengel
- Title
- Associate director of Collections & Academic Services
- Department
- Sheridan Libraries
- Divisions
Liz Mengel has a few million things to manage as the associate director of Collections & Academic Services of the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries.
Under her directorate are the Academic Liaison librarians, Special Collections, Assessment and User Experience, Cultural Properties, Conservation and Preservation, Digitization, and Access Services. And then there's the matter of the books themselves, more than 4.2 million of them—housed across all Johns Hopkins library locations in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and at the Libraries Services Center on the APL campus, where the majority are kept. And, of course, new books are published every week.
"There's a lot of moving parts involved with bringing new books to the library," Mengel says. "If you tracked one book from the idea of ordering it to when it's actually checked out, it goes through a lot of different people. Our goal is to get a book on the shelf as soon as possible so it's available for people to use."
