This week’s interview is with Margaret Wood, a Legal Reference Specialist in the Public Services Division.
Describe your background.
I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where my father, a solid state theoretical physicist, taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When I was five we moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where my dad went to work for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) now the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This was over 20 years after the development of the Atomic Bomb so, although it was an interesting place to grow up, we were not in a position to have Oppenheimer or Teller over for dinner.
What is your academic/professional history?
I went to college at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, where I had a triple major in classics, religion, and medieval history, which I studied under Dr. Marcia Colish. I had intended to be a brilliant history professor but after college I took off for New York City where I became a paralegal with the firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler. After a few years I applied to graduate school and came to Washington, D.C., to attend George Washington University. But the difference of experience in both attending and working at a large university instead of a small college led me to re-evaluate whether or not I wanted to be an academic. After some reflection I realized my mother had suggested years ago that I should become a librarian and I enrolled in The Catholic University’s School of Library and Information Science. I took a number of courses in law librarianship but in my final semester was seduced away to the world of cataloging as taught by Dr. Ingrid Hsieh-Yee.
My first 6-7 years of librarianship included working as a catalogu