Jessica Baumgart
Renesys
Manchester, New Hampshire

As quality assurance engineer for Renesys, Jessica Baumgart ensures the software works properly, contributes to product design, handles support, logs issues, blogs, and gardens the corporate wiki. Before changing jobs in 2007, Jessica had been a news librarian in two university news offices for almost ten years and worked in several academic libraries while a student.

Active in the Special Libraries Association since the late 1990s, Jessica belongs to the News, Solo, and Information Technology Divisions and Boston Chapter. For the News Division, she is presently the Director of Education/Professional Development and has served as webmaster, helped with conference planning, been on the nominating committee, contributed to News Library Newsand the weblog, and mentored first-time conference attendees. She assisted the Boston Chapter with program support through the Logistics Committee, hosts students for Day on the Job activities, and occasionally writes for the chapter's Bulletin. She has also belonged to the American Library Association, American Society for Indexers, American Society for Information Science and Technology, and the New England News Librarians Association.

Jessica visits her alma mater regularly to talk to students about library and information science careers.

Noted for her weblog about news librarianship, j's scratchpad, and her interest in technology, Jessica participates in a number of tech groups. Since 2003, she has been involved in a community of blogging enthusiasts that meets at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and has been helping coordinate the group for several years. She assisted with the planning of the annual conference of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimania, in 2006. She lends a hand with BarCamp Boston, too.

Jessica frequently presents at the SLA Annual Conference and has given a myriad of presentations to numerous other groups, including several SLA chapters, the Boston Center for Adult Education, ASIST, MIT, Harvard, BarCamp, and ACRL.

Her honors include the Boston Chapter's Chapter Achievement Award, being named a Berkman Center affiliate, and the News Division's Vormelker-Thomas Student Award and Agnes Henebry Roll of Honor Award.