By Suzanne Arist, North Suburban Public Library

Katrina Perez is the Information Technology Librarian for Gardner Carton & Douglas LLP, one of Chicago’s 20 largest law firms. Her responsibilities include: managing the firm’s intranet, the Leading Edge; maintaining the firm’s online /cd-rom subscription databases; managing all passwords for those databases; arranging and conducting training for staff and attorneys on electronic resources; and acting as a liaison between attorneys and staff and the Technology department. She refers to herself as speaking both “languages”.

Gardner Carton & Douglas has offices in: Washington, DC; New York, NY; Albany, NY; and Milwaukee, WI. The firm has more than 250 lawyers and advisors practicing in corporate law, corporate restructuring, government relations, health law, human resources law (employee benefits and employment), Indian tribal governments, intellectual property, litigation and dispute resolution, real estate and environmental, wealth planning and philanthropy.

The firm’s client base includes many entities from Fortune 1000 companies to universities to emerging technology companies. In addition, the firm represents foreign entities with business investments in the United States. As a long-standing member of the World Law Group, the firm has established valuable international relationships with law firms that are highly regarded in their respective jurisdictions. Being a member of the World Law Group allows the firm to provide clients with expert, responsive representation throughout the world.

In addition to Katrina’s employment with the law firm, Katrina has been an invaluable member of the Illinois Chapter of the Special Libraries Association. Currently, she is the Chair of the Web Page Committee and she maintains the Chapter’s website at www.slaillinois.org [1]. In the years she has been involved with the Web Page Committee (since 1999!), SLA–IL has moved from a text-based website to one based on Microsoft’s FrontPage, and then to a site running PHP-Nuke, an open source content management system. She manages and maintains all of the content on the website, except MemBrain, which is maintained by the Knowledge Management Committee.

Katrina went to college at Michigan State University where she worked in the library’s Reference Department while obtaining a degree in International Studies. For a year after graduation, she worked as an Associate Editor for Pierian Press. In 1990, she went back to school for her MSLS degree at Wayne State University. After graduating, she began her professional career as a Research Librarian for Keck Mahin & Cate, a law firm in Chicago. She stayed with KM & C for 4 years before taking a newly created position at the Highland Park Public Library: Electronic Resources Librarian. Katrina looks back on teaching internet classes at Highland Park (to many people who had never used a computer) as a great experience. After a year at Highland Park, she was hired by Gardner Carton & Douglas, her current employer.

When asked how she developed expertise in her field, Katrina responded that her mother was a Programmer/Analyst, so she “inherited” a knowledge of computers. She fondly recalls her first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, with a cassette tape drive on which she typed in BASIC games line by line. Katrina didn’t focus her education on technology, but she has always been comfortable with it and eager to try out new tools. While pursuing her Library Science degree, she worked as a graduate assistant; part of her job was testing the telnet connections between different university libraries and their (brand new) online catalogs. Email, gophers, and Mosaic were not far behind. Katrina explains that she has always been the person at work that people come to when any computer-related piece of equipment or application isn’t working. She loves learning how things work, and troubleshooting problems until they are solved. Although she takes classes when she can, she is largely self-taught.

As Katrina progressed through her career, she found her supervisors at Michigan State University inspirational in her career choice. Also, she found the Library Directors at both of the law firms at which she worked to by models of professionalism and a pursuit of excellence.

When Katrina is not at work, she loves to read or watch movies. But most of her time is spent with her two boys, who at two and four years old can be quite a handful!

The advice she would give to a new special librarian who would like to work in information technology, is to stay current (harder than it sounds!) and to make friends with your technology department. The Library and IT Department must work together these days, as so much of the new initiatives like Knowledge Management, Content Management and enterprise search systems need both technical and librarian expertise to succeed.

With her employment experience, volunteer contributions, and her motivation and ability to stay current, Katrina is a terrific role model for aspiring Information Technology Librarians.