Jennifer Castaldo

Castaldo works in a department at the Johns Hopkins University Milton S. Eisenhower Library called the Entrepreneurial Library Program.  The department provides sustainable services to external clients to generate revenue to support the library.

"The long-standing partnership that I am a part of is for a completely online college with no physical campus," Castaldo explains.  "There is a small team of librarians that run this entire online library!  Some of the areas that I am the lead on include licensing and managing all of our e-resources, assessment, and collection development.  Every day is different.  I get to do everything from being a subject liaison, to answering reference questions using cool new technologies, to assessing services.  Recently, I did a poster at ACRL on virtual focus groups that we held with students from all over the country to assess and improve our resources and services."

"My SILS education greatly prepared me for this position," Castaldo admits.  "I graduated undergrad with a degree in English and thought I would be a high school English teacher . . . until I student taught.  I somewhat impulsively decided to apply to library school at the suggestion of a friend.  To be honest, I didn't really know what a librarian did, and I was definitely in the minority on the first day of classes having never worked in a library.  I remember looking at my schedule thinking, what is Organization of Information?  Then, when someone told me it was cataloging, all I could say was, "Huh?"

"One of the best parts of SILS was that I was able to take classes across all different areas to see what interested me. I had no clue about all of the different things you could do with a library degree.  Since I was going to be a teacher, I knew that media specialists existed, so I took a lot of those classes at first.  Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell was an outstanding teacher, and she even helped me get an internship at a middle school library nearby.

"While I loved working at the middle school, I also dabbled in academic library classes. I took Academic Libraries with Barbara Moran and a management course. I ended up getting an internship at Duke University, which really opened my eyes to the many facets of academic librarianship.  I did an internship in reference and one in e-resources.  I loved both!  The best part about my current position is that I didn't have to choose."