CSULB’s Hema Ramachandran has been named “Engineering Librarian of the Year” by the Special Libraries Association’s Engineering Division. A faculty member and engineering librarian at CSULB since 2007, Ramachandran was honored for her professional accomplishments.
She credits her father, a prominent statistician, for planting the seed for her library career. “When I was 14 years old, he said, ‘You should become a librarian—but you should become an engineering or science librarian.’ ”
Ramachandran said her friends tried to dissuade her, saying, “That’s really boring—you can’t do that.”
But as fate would have it, John Laing, an international construction company, was located right across the street. After completing her high school exams, she walked in, asked for a summer job, and went right to work in the library.
Ramachandran made enough of an impression that her supervisor offered her a permanent job that she could take after she went to college. Several months before earning her B.S. in Library Science, that same supervisor knocked on the door and asked Ramachandran’s mother if her daughter had time for an interview. Ramachandran was busy with exams, but her mother insisted she go.
Needless to say, she got the job. “I loved it,” Ramachandran said. “We didn’t have computers then—we had printed indexes.”
Her degree gave her knowledge of library science, but she didn’t know anything about engineering. “I asked a lot of questions,” Ramachandran said. “And all the engineers in the company, including many senior ones, would teach me the basics of civil engineering.”
When she left the London-based job to marry her husband in the United States, the head of the library was teary-eyed. As it turned out, he’d been grooming her to take over running of the John Laing library when he retired.
Much has changed since she entered the field of library science. Research that once would take her an entire day, she can now do in five minutes, thanks to computers and online databases. The biggest issue now is finding credible data in the glut of information.
Ramachandran tries to help students find quality information, since stakes are high for engineering projects. “I tell them, ‘When I get on a plane, I want it to fly safely.’”
During her career, Ramachandran has worked at NASA/STAC on the University of Florida campus, University of New Hampshire, Northwestern University, San Jose State University, Caltech, and Pasadena City College. She was part of a ground-breaking team that digitized Caltech’s computer science technical reports. Based now at CSULB’s University Library, she recently established part-time office hours in the Dudley Library in EN-209 so she could work more closely with engineering students and faculty.
A frequent presenter at industry conferences, including the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), she is co-author of “Lifelong Learning for Engineers and Scientists in the Information Age” (Elsevier, December 2011) , which won the ASEE’s 2013 Best Publication Award. She is also editor of Morgan and Claypool’s “Emerging Trends in Librarianship” series and the editor for engineering titles in RCL: Career Resources – a collection development tool aimed at community college libraries.
A member of the SLA for more than two decades and recipient of its 1996 Leadership Diversity award, Ramachandran has held many positions, including chair of the Aerospace Section. She will receive the award at SLA’s annual conference in Philadelphia in June.