Symposium -- Speaker Biographies

James V. Carmichael, Professor, University of North Carolina -- Greensboro

Jim Carmichael is Professor of Library and Information Studies at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he has taught reference, humanities literature, and an academic Libraries course since 1989. Primarily a library historian concentrating on the southern states, he has also written extensively on gender roles in the profession and GLBT issues. In 1998, he collected essays from founders, practitioners, and students for a volume entitled Daring to Find Our Names: The Search for Lesbigay Library History.  Before receiving his doctorate from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1988, he worked a split assignment as a reference librarian/cataloger/special collections librarian at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Barbara Gittings, Activist and Founder, American Library Association -- GLBT Task Force (now GLBT Round Table)
Photo by Alison Dickman

In addition to being instrumental in having homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders, Gittings founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis and edited its magazine, The Ladder. She has also worked tirelessly within the American Library Association to make materials with GLBTQ content more accessible to the reading public. For a complete biography, please go to http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/gittings_b.html.

Susan E. Parker, Deputy University Librarian & CFO, Young Research Library, UCLA

Susan E. Parker has held leadership positions in the libraries at Tufts University, Harvard Law School, and California State University Northridge. She is currently Deputy University Librarian and CFO for the University Library at UCLA. A 1980 M.L.S. graduate of Queens College, City University of New York, she began her career as a reference librarian specializing in law, history, and government publications. A past chair of the ACRL Law and Political Science Section and a member of LAMA, Parker has served as a member of the Book Award Committee of the ALA LGBT Round Table and was a long-time book reviewer for Library Journal. She is a member of the 2001 class of the Stanford-California State Library Institute and a member of the 2003 UCLA Senior Fellows class. She is a doctoral student in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Capella University. Her expertise is in library disaster recovery and in library planning, budgeting, and assessment processes. She mentors GLBT and ethnic minority librarians, library workers, and library students into administrative roles to help shape the future of university libraries and librarianship.

Yolanda Retter, Librarian, Chicano Studies Resource Center Library and Archive, UCLA

Yolanda Retter is a lesbian history and visibility activist. She manages the UCLA Chicano Studies Library and Archive and the Lesbian History Project web site; serves as a diversity consultant to several lesbian archives and LGBTI publishing projects and managed a lesbian archive for 7 years. She has taught classes on LGBTI history and wrote her dissertation on the history of lesbian activism in Los Angeles, 1970-1990. She first began working in the lesbian and women's movements in 1971.

Yolanda is finishing her post-MLS in archives in the UCLA IS Department. Her focus is on diversity issues in archives, special collections and libraries. She is specifically interested in creating and supporting: Diverse curriculum content in IS programs; Support systems for LGBTI students and students of color; Diversity in staffing and collection building; Competence in the area of services to marginalized groups; Subject expertise in finding aids for the collections of marginalized groups.

Daniel Tsang, Social Science Bibliographer and Data Librarian, Jack Langson Library, UC Irvine

Dan Tsang has been a politics, economics and Asian American studies bibliographer at UC Irvine since 1986.  He heads the Ethnic Studies Librarians Network in the UC system. Born in Hong Kong, his graduate work was done at University of Michigan, where he helped organize the successful Graduate Employees Organization strike in 1975. He also edited Gay Insurgent, a left journal.

Research interests have included: Alternative and gay archiving, the alternative press, moral panics, FBI files on homosexuals,  chemical castration of sex offenders, queer Asian sex dating in cyberspace, and more recently, queer depictions in Vietnamese film. With the help of the ACLU, he successfully sued the CIA for spying on him.  He freelanced for alternative papers such as Frontiers, the Guide, Gaysweek, Gay News (London), CovertAction Quarterly and the SRRT Newsletter, and for mainstream publications like the Far Eastern Economic Review.

His op eds have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News and Philadelphia Daily News.   He hosts Subversity, a weekly progressive interview program on KUCI.  He serves on the boards of the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research and of the Journal of Homosexuality. His homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/. E-mail: dtsang@uci.edu.

James Van Buskirk, Program Manager, James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center, San Francisco Public Library

Jim Van Buskirk has been developing the programs of the James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center at San Francisco Public Library since 1992. In 2002, Jim conceived the "Reversing Vandalism" project in which hundreds of vandalized library books were transformed into works of art, as featured in the recent documentary, Not in Our Town Northern California: When Hate Happens Here.

A graduate of UC Berkeley's MLIS program, Jim has contributed book and video reviews to Library Journal since 1983, receiving the first Library Journal Reviewer of the Year: Nonfiction Award in June 1997.  His reviews have also appeared in James White Review, Art Documentation, Photo Metro, Lambda Book Report, Library Quarterly, Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review and on culturevulture.net. He has made presentations at American Library Association, California Library Association, Special Libraries Association, College Art Association, Art Libraries Society/North America and at the library schools of University of California, Los Angeles and Berkeley and San Jose State University.

Jim co-authored the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, with Susan Stryker, and Celluloid San Francisco: The Film Lover's Guide to Bay Area Movie Locations, with Will Shank. He co-edited the forthcoming anthology, Identity Envy: Wanting to Be Who We Are Not: Creative Nonfiction by Queer Writers, with Jim Tushinski. He is currently co-editing an anthology with Katherine V. Forrest, to be entitled Love, Castro Street. Jim's writing has been featured such books as The Best of San Francisco, San Francisco Almanac, Liberating Minds, I Do, I Don't: Queers on Marriage, Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving, in Cabaret Scenes magazine, on KPFA radio, and online at http://www.queer-arts.org. For more information, please visit: jimvanbuskirk.com.