Charlotte Erdmann, associate professor, will retire on June 30, 2016 after 32 years with Purdue University Libraries. Charlotte began her Purdue career on June 4, 1984 as the Head of Reference of the Engineering Library and Computerized Searching Librarian.
She conducted searches in the pay-as-you-go databases of Dialog and the like, where you pay by the search and by the number of records retrieved...so it was very important to do an efficient and effective job. From 1986-1989, Charlotte worked part-time with Purdue’s Technical Assistance Program (TAP) which included a team of Purdue faculty and graduate students who solved problems for Indiana’s small and medium-sized businesses. When she returned to the Engineering Library full-time, one of the most unique projects that she accomplished was chairing the committee that designed all the help screens when the Libraries mounted COMPENDEX locally on our servers through NOTIS in 1992. While most institutions were getting access to databases via a still intermittent internet, Purdue decided we would have better access and could customize our interface if we ran the database internally.
Since 1996, Charlotte has taken on primary responsibility for collections in the Engineering Library, always taking a system-wide view, suggesting sources for other libraries and looking to pool resources to purchase interdisciplinary content. She has also worked as a Liaison Librarian for Aeronautics and Astronautics, Aviation Technology, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Technology. In recent years, she has been involved in digitizing projects and data mining.
Professionally, Charlotte is well-regarded in technical information societies. She served as Director and Chair of the Engineering Libraries Division of the American Society of Engineering Education (ELD-ASEE), and President of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association (PTRCA), as well as receiving a year-long fellowship at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. She has been Purdue’s representative to the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Program since 1991 and the Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL) since its inception, and is on the advisory board for Begell House publishers.
Charlotte has had a very full career at Purdue, which we will be celebrating at a reception June 21, from 2-3:30 p.m. in the Engineering Library, Room B50 with remarks beginning at 2:30 p.m.
If you plan to attend, please respond by June 17, 2016
http://go.lib.purdue.edu/events/erdmann |