Karen Gavigan (’78) always knew where her path would lead: there were no circuitous routes or first careers, just a beeline to librarianship. She had role models, including an aunt and a high school librarian, who inspired her to follow in their footsteps. What she didn’t know is that her path would one day lead to being an interim director of an iSchool, which is her current position at the University of South Carolina’s School of Information Science.
Becoming a Librarian
While librarianship is Gavigan’s calling, part of that passion is teaching—which is one of the reasons she pursued school librarianship and later a doctoral degree in curriculum and instruction. After earning an undergraduate degree in secondary education and English from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Gavigan went directly into the program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s School of Information Sciences. In 1977, the degree was a Master’s of Science in Library Science (MSLS) and the program was only one year long. While it was a short time to get acquainted with a new school and state, Gavigan has fond memories of her year there. She said it was during the program that the idea of teaching people to become librarians was seeded.
“I had Dr. Glenn Estes and I loved him, I just loved him. He’d say, ‘People, you need to get a PhD. You need to be a library educator, we need more of them.’ He’d encourage and encourage us and that was always in the back of my mind and I thought, ‘Maybe I will someday.’ But you know how life goes, I didn’t get my PhD until I was 55, I was a late bloomer,” she said.
While Gavigan’s initial intention upon graduating with her master’s was to become a school librarian in Richmond, Virginia, at that time there was a shortage of those jobs—a fact that shocks many of Gavigan’s current students, as school librarians are in high demand in the 2020s.
So she instead found a position working as a children’s and young adult librarian at Henrico County Library for a bit, then moved from there to Washington, D.C. In D.C., she worked for the Alexandria Public Library at the Queens Street Library in the historical district.
“It was wonderful, and I had a wonderful mentor librarian. I was there four years; I actually started in children’s and YA and they moved me over to reference and I became head of reference. I’d probably still be there today if I hadn’t met my husband, because I loved that district, it was a very strong public library system,” she said.
She moved to Winston-Salem after marrying, where she served as a reference librarian as well as head of the library’s film and video collection. While that was a lively and interesting position, the opportunity finally arose that allowed her to finally fulfill her desire to become a school librarian. She did that for quite some time before a unique position opened up as director of the Teaching Resource Center at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Becoming a Teacher
Gavigan said the Teaching Resource Center job was great because she was the librarian for future librarians and teachers. She had a generous budget and was tasked with curating materials for the library and information sciences students, as well as for the students and interns at the College of Education. Through that position, she became friends with a faculty member at the library science department.
“My friend came down one day and said, ‘I think you should get your PhD.’ So I did,” Gavigan said.
She decided to keep her options broad by studying curriculum and instruction, and continued to worked full-time while acquiring her doctorate. She completed the program at UNC Greensboro in spring 2010 and went straight to becoming a faculty member at UofSC that fall.
“I love this, this has been my favorite job of all. I am glad I had all of my library experiences so I could tell my students about it, but this has been my favorite,” Gavigan said.
Her time as a practitioner in public, school, and academic librarianship have informed her teaching, and her classes center on the topics in which she has the most expertise. Her favorite class to teach is young adult literature, but she’s also taught library administration, library management, and the school library internship class.
While she thoroughly enjoyed her time teaching, when UofSC started offering early retirement packages in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she took them up on it and retired in December 2020. But, that didn’t last long, as Gavigan soon received a call asking her to step in for a year as interim director of the UofSC School of Information Science upon the departure of its previous director.
“I never anticipated being in an administrative position; I was chair of the school library committee, but that’s a big difference. You see things a lot differently when you see the budgets and you know what you’re working with, it’s been an eye opener but I’m enjoying it. We’ve got a great faculty and staff and that’s why I agreed to come back,” she said.
She even extended her interim stay for another year as the school searches for a new director, though after this, she plans to stay retired. Besides seeing academia through the new lens of an administrator, returning afforded her with another opportunity: she was finally able to teach a class on her area of research, graphic novels. She also gets to see the continued evolution of her chosen profession, which is heading in new directions she would have never imagined as a fresh master’s graduate in 1978.
The Future of Librarianship
One memory of the SIS program has stayed with Gavigan, and that was when a professor walked her class down a hall in the previous (and now non-existent) home of the school, Temple Court, and opened the door to what looked like a janitor’s closet. “And there was a huge mainframe in there and I laughed when I saw it, but was told that this is the future,” she said.
In the last 44 years, Gavigan has been in the midst of the same changes the rest of the world has experienced as computers, the internet, and new technology disrupted every profession.
She went from working at a reference desk that had a subscription to a New York Times call-up service, where they could ask reference questions and the service would answer them—and even then some of her librarian colleagues thought that was a complete waste of funding and that books would always be an end-all for answers—to working in the age of Googling.
Gavigan evolved along with the rest of the world and with her fellow librarians. She experienced that rocky period wherein many people began questioning the existence of libraries as information was suddenly in easy reach of most of the population’s fingertips. Now she is seeing libraries come out on the other side as librarians continue to prove their services as more relevant than ever.
She had initially been against the UofSC School of Information Science changing from a library science school to an iSchool, but says now she sees how that increased the value of the school’s degrees. The school has both undergraduate and graduate programs that are ever-expanding in offerings as the demand for information professionals grows. They’ve initiated new certificates and degrees to fulfill the workforce’s needs, including in areas such as data and communications, as well as future minors and degrees in user experience design, and cyber and information sciences. Though she may be retiring soon, Gavigan is looking forward to what this next generation of librarians and information science professionals do.
“I just chuckle because the data shows we need libraries more than ever, so that’s been interesting. The misconception that libraries and librarians are not needed because of the internet, I think that’s dying down; people realize more and more that libraries are needed. The students are still getting jobs and doing great things out in the field,” she said.•