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Debbie
LaMastus: Multitalented and Multi-teriffic!
 |
| Debbie
LaMastus and her daughter Tyra |
By
Rosemary Meszaros
I’ll
bet you know that the Kentucky’s State Horse is the
Thoroughbred, but did you know that the State Wild Animal
is the Grey Squirrel—hey, don’t tell that to Western’s
famous white squirrels!—or that the State Tree is the
Tulip Tree? All you have to do is ask Debbie LaMastus. She
knows Kentucky! Debbie has been the Kentucky State Documents
Specialist for the last 16 years at WKU Libraries. During
those years she has earned her Associates degree in Paralegal
Studies and is currently pursuing a B.A. degree in interior
design at Western. Debbie is the mother of three WKU graduates:
Jeannie, Kim and Tyra, and the grandmother of two future Hilltoppers:
Cannon and Chapel.
As
part of her position in the Government Documents & Law
Information unit, Debbie supervises a student staff, manages
the documents and law bindery operations, accumulates Kentucky
state documents for our collection, and catalogs both Kentucky
and Federal Documents. Debbie is an excellent resource for
law and government information. Having gone through the Paralegal
Studies Program, she has a thorough background in legal research
and shares that knowledge with our patrons. In addition, Debbie
participates in the web group that manages the KERA, Resources
on the Kentucky
Education Reform Act web site.
On
the national scene, Debbie created and maintains a web site
on Kentucky for the
Browse Topics web, a partnership between Oklahoma State
University and the U. S. Government Printing Office.
For
several years Debbie has been the Kentucky contributor to
the annual Notable State Documents feature article in the
referred Journal of Government Information, and she
co-authored an article on KERA for Kentucky Monthly.
Western
recognized her outstanding public service with the Margie
Helm Staff Award in 1993.
Debbie
is a familiar face down at the National Corvette Museum, too.
She has worked there in the gift shop part-time since the
museum opened in 1994. She’s even developed a taste
for NASCAR racing herself. She and husband Don traveled to
Daytona recently to cheer on Jeff Gordon to victory.
The
need for speed isn’t confined to the four-wheeled variety,
Debbie is an avid horsewoman. Over the years, she and Don
have raised, trained and shown champion quarter horses. Miss
Sonny Bee won the Kentucky Breeders Futurity. So,
if it’s about horses, Corvettes, law, or Kentucky, consult
our expert, Debbie LaMastus.
Authority
File Work: Where Are We? We Are Coming Along!
by
Katy Roe
In
the last issue, I wrote about a project that had been started
in the Department of Library Technical Services (DLTS) called
our Authority Control Project. This project was started in
February 2004 by the Bibliographic Access Unit to work little
by little to clean up authority files in the WKU TOPCAT system
and add new ones as needed. After attending several workshops
and training sessions, we started working with our series
authority files. At the time the first article was written,
we had already done over 5,000 records in just a few months,
which, given our other duties and responsibilities, was quite
an accomplishment.
 Despite
the renovation of our floor last fall, we concentrated on
updating these titles, After finishing the first 5,000 records,
a huge start for us, we have entered over 15,000 in the past
fifteen month. Working with these records has been a slow
and tedious process because the series titles have to be searched
in TOPCAT and OCLC, the records have to be imported from OCLC
to TOPCAT, and finally adjustment has to be made to any of
the records in TOPCAT that were attached to those particular
series titles.
Since all of the Bib Access unit and a few others have been
working on the authority file titles, the DLTS faculty decided
to host a pizza party in celebration of our accomplishments
on this project. We also thought it would be fun to “honor”
two people, the person who worked on and entered the 10,000th
record, and the person who had entered the most records. Our
departmental party was held on April 26, 2005. Linda Davis
and Ann Brown were our “queens for the day.” Linda
happened to be the one who entered the 10,000th series authority
record, and Ann has entered over 4,000 series authority records.
We have accomplished quite a lot with this series authority
file control project because over 15,000 records is quite
a feat. However, there are still many to do. TOPCAT records
are being entered and cleaned up on a daily basis, and we
certainly hope that searching a series now in TOPCAT is an
easier task. We are all working hard to complete the series
phase of this project, but as you can see, this will be an
on-going project for some time yet to come. |
