A librarian should love working with people and be service-oriented, according to the director of the De Anza College Library, Tom Dolen.

Dolen has been the director for about a year; he has been working at De Anza for nine years as a librarian. 

“I am very happy to work in a community college library because I can do a number of different tasks in every working day. I can work with students at a reference desk, teach classes, catalogue books,” he said.

The most exciting thing for him, however, is working with the “diverse and vibrant” De Anza student community. “Students’ diversity in natural origin, religion, culture and language are all reflected in the library collection,” he said.

Dolen’s advice for students doing research is to start by consulting the reference librarians, even if they think they can complete it without help. Most students, he said, start with a Google search without being aware of the special databases that they as De Anza students have access to. Although Google includes a wide range of sources, it takes more time to filter through its search results than it would through the specialty databases. Reference librarians can help a student access an article on the Internet for free that otherwise would be available for a fee. 

The De Anza library contains about 100,000 books, periodicals and other documents; it also provides access to more than 14,000 online documents. 

Dolen plans to make improvements or perform slight remodeling if the county will appropriate money in the next two years. In particular, he wants to make improvements in the building’s lighting system to allow more daylight into reading rooms.   

Besides printed material, the library checks out laptops to students for a few hours. The library has 14 laptops, and students can check them out to use within the library building. The computers were donated by Fujitsu Corp.

The folklore artifacts hanging on the library’s walls were donated by the Rutner family, he said. The Rutners love traveling and collecting folklore arts from Africa and Asia. The items on the wall are used in art classes.   

Despite the benefits of being a librarian, few students choose to become a librarian as a career, Dolen said. That is because a librarian is stereotyped as a “too conservative, boring book worm.” However, this stereotype is spread by those who never have been in a library, he said.