Larry McCallumReference Librarian
Sometimes you really do get to have your cake and eat it too although ‘dessert’ might be years in coming. When Larry McCallum reached the end of his undergraduate studies in 1984, he applied both to library school and journalism school, then made a difficult decision to pursue the latter. Ten years or so further on, having grown tired of chasing stories and editing other people’s copy, Larry went back and completed an MLIS the path not taken a decade earlier. During the intervening years, he’d met and married Sybil, herself a librarian. “Life has a way of bringing you full-circle,” he says today.
His second career, as a librarian, has been quite diverse, taking him through corporate, public and academic libraries, some college instruction, and luring him from Vancouver, BC, to Calgary, Alberta, and then to Moscow, ID, Vancouver, WA, and Seattle, where he currently lives. Even now, he generally works at public libraries when he’s not employed halftime as a reference librarian at PLU; so his feet are still firmly in both camps working with both the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification systems.
But diversity is Larry’s lifestyle. Growing up in Vancouver, BC, he quickly dropped out of college to work and travel spending 17 months in Europe in 1979-80, and another 17 months, in 1980-81, traveling around Asia, including China (then newly open to foreign travelers), Burma, India, and a three-week independent trek through the Annapurna Range in Nepal.
Unable to finance long excursions for several years while getting started as a reporter and editor, Larry resumed traveling, with Sybil, in the 1990s, backpacking almost the length and breadth of Mexico, returning to Europe (including, this time, the former East Bloc), and riding their little BMW R65 twin down to San Francisco and New Mexico.
Besides travel and Sybil, Larry’s other passion is the arts. He’s been a jazz fan since high school, when he played in various jazz bands, and loves taking in jazz festivals such as Seattle’s Earshot. He also loves reading, still dipping frequently into the Western Canon, a passion he acquired as a lit-crit major. Otherwise, he can usually be found walking, bicycling, photographing, or building and maintaining various websites.
“Primarily, librarians organize and retrieve information. But increasingly they also present information as part of their role of guiding users whether in the form of online user interfaces, or effective signs, or brochures. And I like to think my training and experience in publishing are an asset in that regard,” he says.
More about Larry can be found @ http://www.plu.edu/~mccallla/