The Colby Echo

Issue date: 3/16/07 Section: News & Features

Marilyn R. Pukkila loves her job. "It saddens me to think how few people I know who can say what I say-that I have a job that I absolutely love that pays me well that I feel makes an important contribution to the world. It is such a rich gift to have," she said.

Pukkila has been working at the College for twenty-three years. As Head of Instructional Services for the Colby Libraries, she oversees all of the instruction that goes on in the libraries. "I work with classes to show them library resources and how they operate - how do you know if a website is good, how do you make sure the information you just got is accurate, how do you use information ethically, how do you represent it properly," she said. "It is easy to hop on Google and sometimes that is a good strategy, but the next stop is to evaluate what you found and say 'yeah, this is ideal' or 'hmmm this is kind of sketchy.'"

Pukkila was born in Woodbury, New Jersey and grew up in Wilton, Connecticut. After receiving her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, she moved on to get her Masters of Science in Library Science from Columbia University.

Pukkila's first post-degree job was working at Fairfield University. After several years working at Fairfield she moved to the UK for a year to study for a Masters in Medieval History at the University College of Wales. "I knew that to advance in academic librarianship it was useful to have a subject degree and history was one of my majors," she said. "I went to Wales and came back and by that time had some job experience and a second degree and was more marketable."

She returned to the States and after spending five months working three part-time jobs and living with her parents, Pukkila got job offers from three institutions. "The Colby interview came first and I came here and knew that I didn't really care about the others, and that this is where I wanted to be," she said.

In addition to working in the Library, Pukkila also teaches several JanPlan courses - Contemporary Witchcraft in Religious studies, Tolkien's Sources in the English Department, and Women in Myth and Fairytale in the Women's and Gender Studies Department. "I got here and one thing I was told is that librarians have been known to offer classes over January. I wasn't at all sure that teaching was something I wanted to do and in the end it turns out that it's something I love the most about my job," she said.

After six years working at the College, Pukkila took her first sabbatical and traveled to York, England and trained as a Minster Librarian. "At that point I was interested personally in feminist spirituality. During that year I did a lot of reading and realized I wanted to turn it into a class."

Continued...

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