C.J. Sullivan, Outreach Services Coordinator at Antioch Library, started out early in inheriting her mother’s voracious appetite for books. To feed this appetite, C.J. remembers visiting, weekly, both the local neighborhood bookmobile and the Carnegie Library in St. Joseph, Missouri. It was the Bookmobile Librarian who opened up her world to Children’s Literature. Soon, however, C.J. and her sister had read all the children’s books; now with their mother’s library card they were moving on to start devouring the adult titles.
In 1971 C.J. finished a B.S. in education at the Missouri Western University in St. Joseph. After completing her bachelor’s, C.J. worked as a teacher and school librarian and in 1980 she reached another milestone when finishing her Master’s in Library Science at Emporia State University. After library school, C.J. decided to do things the hard way by prolonging any immediate continuation of her library career. She worked as a stock broker at Waddell & Reed, a head hunter recruiting librarians, an Avon District Sales Manager (where she managed 200 Avon representatives), and a project coordinator for a corporate video production company; then, finally, in 1991 C.J. started work as a library page at the Antioch Library.
C.J. decided to work as a library page to see if she wanted to get back into library work. Soon the decision was finalized, she went from a page to a clerk, and then in 1993 she started working with the fee-based Reference service at Antioch. In 1995 she became a Reference Librarian at Central, which was at the new location on 87th Street. Later, following reference work, C.J. became the Assistant Branch Manager of Lackman Library in 1997. It was in 1998, however, that C.J. became Johnson County Library’s Outreach Coordinator, where she has worked for the past eight years.
In the 1990s Librarian Jean Hatfield began promoting the idea of pushing library services outside the library. These services started with senior services and expanded to include homebound services, programs, and booktalks. Today, Outreach Services includes the work of Librarians Kathy McClellan and Lynn Wild, Clerk Bobbie Grossi, and the aid of eleven volunteers. Their work is award winning, including the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA) Exceptional Service Award for 2006, which is awarded from the American Library Association. The Outreach Department also received the National Association of Counties (NACo) 2006 Award titled
Not Forgotten: Literature for Adults with Developmental Disabilities. C.J., in addition to leading the Outreach Services Department, also leads a program titled SAW (Stories About Women) at the Department of Corrections Residential Center and, during the school year, at the Johnson County Community College she teaches a poetry class for adults with learning disabilities.
When C.J. isn’t working hard to bring the library’s services to those outside its brick and mortar walls, she enjoys spending time gardening and watching pensive movies—movies that make you think about important issues, she told me. She mentioned Al Gore’s film
An Inconvenient Truth, as an example. C.J. also enjoys eating at restaurants in Missouri and attending live theater. She has a very large and unusual collection of figurines of people reading that she has been diligently collecting over the years. And, of course, as already mentioned C.J. loves to read, some of her favorite authors include Jodi Picoult, Anita Shreve, and Anne Tyler.
In concluding my interview with C.J., I asked her to tell me something she thought would surprise those who knew her. She told me that she was an “I”. On the Myers-Briggs Test, C.J. was classified as an introvert. Her work and her personality would make you think otherwise.
We want to bring you the tools you need to quickly find the information and resources you want. To accomplish this, we have to run updates to our library systems. Recently, we updated the library’s catalog over the weekend of November 2 through 7. In conclusion to that successful catalog upgrade, we would like to ask you a few questions about the process. The information you share with us will help us to make better decisions in the future when conducting improvements to our library systems.
