Welcome Angela Carritt, Continuing Education Librarian
A librarian for 22 years, Angela Carritt is no newcomer to the University of Oxford. She joins Continuing Education from a position as the Bodleian Libraries’ Information Skills Coordinator, running, among other things, the Bodleian iSkills workshops in information discovery and scholarly communications, which over the years have been attended by many Continuing Education students. In the same role, she also launched the Bodleian’s Libraries’ LibGuides research guides service.
Angela started work in March, after the retirement of Sue Pemberton, our librarian for more than 12 years.
Previously, Angela worked at the Bodleian Law Library, where she was mainly responsible for running workshops in legal research skills for undergraduates.
Further back still, Angela worked in the Bodleian Libraries’ Special Collections Department (focusing on indexing modern political and literary papers), as Assistant Librarian at St. Hilda’s College, and at the University of Reading.
Angela is also no stranger to Continuing Education. ‘I am particularly thrilled to be joining the Continuing Education library,’ she explains, ‘because I myself have taken a number of courses with the Department, including evening classes in post war modern politics and Spanish language, a couple of weekend schools (one on the Spanish Civil War and another on IT), and a summer school back in the 1990s on Internet for Social Sciences, taught by the wonderful Andrew Burchart. I have very much enjoyed and valued both the courses I’ve attended and using the Continuing Education library - and so I’m really delighted to be joining the team.’
She lives in Oxford with her partner and a mischievous Labrador who is commonly known as Mr. M. A keen walker, Angela spends her holidays hiking, and confesses to a particular fondness for the Lake District.
What’s the best thing about life as a librarian? Helping students, she says.
‘High quality, pertinent information can be difficult to track down and I really enjoy working with students to track down the particular information needle in the haystack which will inform their learning or research.’ Angela is keen to meet with individual students to help them make the best possible use not only of the Continuing Education library but also the wide range of electronic and printed materials available through the wider Bodleian Libraries.
She also loves running classes to help people make the most of the library and the amazing resources available to them, and gets a kick out of working with library systems and services to make them more user-friendly.
One of the things she’s most looking forward to in her new role is choosing printed and electronic books and journals to support the wide range of programmes on offer through Continuing Education.
Although she loves working with academic books and journals, her favourite books at home are mainly fiction. Particular favourites are The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, the House of Spirits by Isabel Allende and The Passion by Jeannette Winterson.
Angela is excited to take on the ‘significant challenge’ of running a library which serves such a wide range of subjects and programmes, both for students in Oxford and distance learners.
‘The Continuing Education library already has a reputation for first-class customer service and I’m looking forward to joining the team, and working with them to further develop and build services for students and academics,’ she says. She is full of ideas and plans for the library, and although it would be premature to divulge them here, she says: ‘I will be looking to the future, and how the library can develop new services to respond to changes in the information environment and in student needs and expectations.’
Published 3 April 2018