Caltech Library News

Phillip Jaffe Joins the Library as Engineering & Applied Science Librarian

In mid-June, Phillip Jaffe moved to California right after graduating with his master’s degree in library science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and assumed his new role as Caltech's Engineering & Applied Science Librarian. He settled in just in time for summer, and we asked him some questions to introduce him to the campus community. Join us in welcoming Phillip to the Library and say hi the next time you're in Sherman Fairchild!

Congratulations on your new position as our Librarian for Engineering and Applied Science! What appealed to you about this position?

Thank you—I’m so glad to be here. Since pursuing librarianship, it has been my goal to support research in an academic library setting, ideally in a scientific or technical discipline. So I really can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than here, at an institution dedicated to research excellence that’s constantly at the frontier of scientific knowledge. What I also found appealing was Caltech’s small size—especially compared to other universities with similar research outputs. I imagine this will enhance the human aspect of the job, making it more feasible to maintain working relationships with students, faculty, and staff in the division, and to stay tuned into what individuals are working on.

During your interview, we were all interested in your internship with the Executive Office of the President. Could you tell us a little about it?

I was very lucky to intern last summer in the Library of the Executive Office of the President in Washington, DC. The library’s mission is to support EOP staff, which includes the staff of the White House Office, in their work for the president of the United States. While the library of course holds all sorts of legal materials and government documents, it also maintains a print collection of popular nonfiction books—covering policy areas and political and presidential history—much like what you would find in a public library. During my internship, I helped to field reference questions from EOP staff, which varied widely in scope. Responding to a request could be as simple as retrieving a newspaper article or recommending some books on a certain issue, or it could be as involved as examining the legislative history of a particular regulation.

You recently completed your degree in library science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. What are some things that you've learned that you can bring to this new role?

One course I found to be particularly valuable and enjoyable focused on collection management. Through a series of projects for the course, I got experience evaluating a large collection for content strengths and gaps—and identifying candidate materials for acquisition as well as for removal from the collection. I hope to apply similar skills to ensure that the Caltech Library’s collection stays appropriately tailored to the research being conducted in the EAS division. I was also lucky in that there are many libraries on the UW-Madison campus, so over the course of my time there, I was able to work in a few that specialized in different scientific disciplines.

What do you like about working in libraries? What inspired you to pursue a career as a librarian?

One short answer is that I like finding stuff.

As an undergrad, my favorite part of any research assignment was always getting all my resources together—following trails of bibliographies and navigating physical and digital library spaces to locate anything that might be relevant. It was then that I first floated the possibility of pursuing a career in librarianship and started talking to librarians at my university about their work.

I am also very interested in the research process. Although I don’t think I would have it in me to do research myself, I very much like the idea of working in a research-adjacent role, where I can have a broad view of the information lifecycle and of knowledge production in a wider range of disciplines.

Lastly, I’d be disingenuous not to mention the lifestyle considerations in my decision to pursue librarianship: A library is a pleasant space in which to pass a workday, and one that I find relatively easy to get out of bed for. There are books around. There’s not a lot of yelling. Hardly ever an emergency. If any career path is mentally sustainable for me, it’s this one.

What are some of your goals, hopes, and/or plans for working with the Division of Engineering and Applied Science?

My plan is to keep in close contact with the various EAS departments, so that I can stay up to date on the research and education happening throughout the division, and make sure that the library’s collections and services accommodate the division’s needs. I’m also hoping to help uphold this institution’s tradition of benefiting society, by making sure that the knowledge produced in the EAS division is disseminated as widely, and has as great an impact, as possible.