Remembering Our Colleague, Christa Buswell
Posted on November 30, 2009 by ebrennan | No Comments
Compiled by Alice Witkowski and Marsha Kmec; based in part on an excerpt from the MLGSCA History of a Medical Library Association Chapter, 1948-1998.
Christa Buswell, retired Chief of Library Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in West Los Angeles, passed away on November 16, 2009 after a brief illness.
Services in honor of Christa were held on Sunday, November 29Â at 10:30AM at St. Augustine by the Sea Episcopal Church, Santa Monica, CA. Flowers and/or donations in her name to St. Augustine’s Church are welcome as is any form of love in her honor and memory.
Christa began her library career as a library assistant at the Free Public Library in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1956. During her library career, Christa worked at the University of Southern California (1957-1959), VA Brentwood (1957-1965), VA San Diego (1965-1976), and VA Wadsworth-West Los Angeles Medical Center (1976-1996). Christa, who earned her MLS degree from UCLA in 1969, was active in many professional organizations during her career, including the American Library Association, the Medical Library Association, the Medical Library Group of Southern California and Arizona, the Society of Public Health Education, the Advisory Council of the UCLA Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the Consumer Health Information Cooperative, the California Library Services Board, and the Metro-Med Cooperative Library System.
In MLGSCA, Christa chaired and participated on many committees, served as its President in 1984-1985 and received the organization’s highest honor, the Louise Darling MLGSCA Achievement Award, in 1994. While Christa was a self-professed reluctant joiner of organizations, when she joined an organization she always gave it her best shot. She was passionately committed to the profession of library and information science and delighted in mentoring and helping younger professionals in their development. Her sense of humor and love of fun and good times was legend.
Those who had the honor and pleasure of working with Christa on a committee or project will always remember Christa’s creativity and how stimulating it was to work with her. One notable project in the library arena came about in the eighties, when the profession was showing definite signs of malaise, such as the closing of graduate library programs and massive layoffs. In response, Christa initiated and led the planning for the “A Profession at the Crossroads†symposium. At this symposium, librarians from MLGSCA, NCNMLG, and the Special Library Association met with national library leaders to critically appraise the future of the library profession. Many outcomes seen in the profession today, such as the effects of increased access to databases by end-users, the use of the internet, and management of electronic resources, were presaged at this symposium.
Posted 11/30/09
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