Susan Richards brought the experience and perspective of five previous college library positions, but not a television set, to Appleton when she was named director of Seeley G. Mudd Library in 1999. Befitting someone who encourages reading for a living, Richards has not owned a television since 1980 when hers died, a condition she admits provides ample time for pleasure reading but limits her ability to hold conversations at cocktail parties.
Thanks to the technology boom of recent years, specifically the emergence of the Internet, Richards, who carries the faculty rank of associate professor as well as the title of university librarian, has witnessed a sea change in libraries, an unprecedented explosion of information and an equally dramatic increase in the complexity of how that information is organized. She sees one of her primary roles as supporting the college's curriculum and assisting faculty members to achieve their classroom goals by helping locate relevant information amid the maze of sources.
Richards is actively engaged in planning library service upgrades and aesthetic improvements, including a $1.3 million renovation of the library's main floor and media center that she proudly notes was completed while maintaining normal operating hours and in time for the start of school this fall.
During the past academic year, Richards wrote the article "Fraternal, Clubs and Service Organizations," in Magazines for Libraries and was a contributor to On Account of Sex: An Annotated Bibliography on the Status of Women in Librarianship, 1993-1997. Women's history is a subject of particular interest to Richards, who is completing her Ph.D. in American history with a dissertation that compares the types of work women performed in the 19th-century, focusing specifically on women in Barre, Vermont, and Trinidad, Colorado.
Her interest in things historic also helped Richards earn a $10,000 grant from the California Council for the Humanities to organize "A Most Worthy Enterprise: The California Architecture of Allison and Allison," a two-year traveling exhibition of photographs and artifacts of historic California schools, libraries, churches, and universities. She served as project scholar on the exhibition in conjunction with the curator of the National Trust Library at the University of Maryland.