Kristine Rex to Retire from Western, June 2020
Kristine (Kris) Rex will retire from Western Washington University after 39 years at Western Libraries on June 30, 2020. Kris has been a longtime member of the Cataloging and Metadata Services department of Western Libraries, and she began working as a temporary worker in Cataloging before becoming a fulltime cataloger. She has cataloged every format of material, including music, curriculum, documents, children’s books, serials, rare books, maps, and electronic resources.
“My favorite things are anything that really challenges me, and anything electronic,” stated Kris. “I, along with Tamara Belts, Ruth Steele, and Peter Smith, were the ones who started working with CONTENTdm and metadata standards. With the help of David Bass, I moved the electronic theses from CONTENTdm to CEDAR, which was the first collection in Western CEDAR. And of course, we have moved the rest of the CONTENTdm collections into MABEL now.”
In recent years, Kris has served as the interim Tech Services Representative to the Orbis Cascade Alliance, represented cataloging/metadata interests on the Alma Management Team at Western Libraries, and served as lead cataloger for WWU’s theses, (both electronic and physical). Kris also took the lead on the Western CEDAR metadata remediation project, and played a key role in the metadata crosswalking component during the migration of digital collections from CONTENTdm to MABEL. She was a member of the MABEL Team, which received the 2019 Team Recognition Award at Western, and she has spearheaded countless metadata development projects, many of her own devising.
“It has been exciting to me to be able to be at the forefront of all of the digital initiatives and to see them grow, be used and preserved for the future,” explained Kris, adding, “Who would have known that digital assets would be so important during this pandemic?”
Any accounting of Kris’s contributions to the success of Western Libraries and its users will be incomplete, but it must be stated that she has without a doubt had an immense impact on the library and on Western. Kris has said that a favorite part of her job has been the people she has worked with over the years, and we at Western Libraries will miss her very much. We know that as an organization, we will not be the same without her kind spirit, industrious work ethic, and keen institutional memory. As we are unable to celebrate with her in person at this time, we hope you will join us in wishing Kris all the best in her well-earned retirement.