Whittier College Librarian Mike Garabedian ’98 was pursuing a Ph.D in literature at Northwestern University with the intention of becoming a professor when the idea first hit him that librarianship might be “a pretty cool gig.”
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a librarian who knew they wanted to be a librarian from the get-go—it’s sort of something one discovers along the way,” added Garabedian.
While working in an antiquarian book store as a graduate student, he befriended a number of librarians from the University of Chicago and the Newberry Library. Conversations with these fellow book lovers confirmed his hunch and he soon made the switch in his career track.
If his tenure at Whittier is any indication, he made the right choice. Garabedian has recently been promoted to associate librarian as he enters his sixth year as Wardman Library’s Collections Management Librarian.
“Since coming to Whittier College he has become a very important member of the Library staff,” said Library Director Laurel Crump. “His expertise with cataloging, acquisitions, and rare books, along with his commitment of service to the library, campus, and community are all indicative of Mike’s high standards of professionalism.”
An English literature undergraduate major, Garabedian went on to earn an M.A. in English literature at Northwestern University and master’s of library and information science at UCLA.
After earning his second master’s degree he worked in the antiquarian book trade in Los Angeles for three years.
“It was a really fun time and I got to analyze and describe a lot of really rare and special books from the 15th to the 19th centuries, but after a while I really wanted to be back among scholars and researchers in a library,” he said.
At Wardman Library he is in charge of overall collection development, acquisitions, and maintenance of the monographs in the library’s collection.
“I hope to have done a little to restore something of what’s sometimes called ‘book culture’ here in Wardman Library, paying attention not only to the intellectual content of the books in our collections but also their physical forms,” explains Garabedian.
According to Garabedian, at Whittier librarians are paying attention not merely to content but also to books’ physical forms, and what these forms say about the social-historical moments in which the books were produced.
To this end, the library acquires not only new publications, but also very good copies of older, out-of-print books that are primary sources and seminal works in given disciplines.
“I really like acquiring these books, and describing them so they stand a better chance of being discovered,” said Garabedian. “Hands down though the people at Whittier are the best part of my job. The folks I work with are like family, and the intellectually curious and community-minded students, staff, and faculty I have the privilege of helping every single day make me very proud to be here.”
