Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Marlene and I live in Sacramento with my husband, daughter, and chihuahua-terrier Lily. I earned two bachelor degrees in Spanish and Religious Studies from UC Davis in 2014, and worked in the education field for a couple of years. Then I earned a Masters in Spanish from Sacramento State University in 2020 and the Covid 19 pandemic happened. I had been questioning my career as an educator while I was completing my masters degree, but the pandemic gave me the final push to pursue my dream career as a librarian. As a child, I wanted to become a librarian but I was dissuaded from it by being told it wasn’t a real career and it paid poorly. That notion stuck with me until I decided to just go for it. I enrolled at SJSU in Spring 2022 and got a part time job as a library assistant at a public library, and instantly knew it was where I was meant to be. Some of the roles I have in my library is being a Homework Center Coordinator, plan programs, catalog and manage the children’s collection, the Spanish children’s collection, and the Spanish adult collection, reader’s advisory, reference services, and translate for Spanish-speaking patrons and transcribe resources in Spanish. Doing the work that I do means I talk to a variety of people from different backgrounds; and I want to help improve the services that libraries offer to their patrons and their surrounding communities to meet their needs and create a better sense of belonging for any person that comes into a library.