Karen Clay — Director, Pierce Library

Karen Clay is the new director of EOU's Pierce Library. Clay comes to EOU from Stanford University where she served as head of both the Engineering Library and the Science and Engineering Libraries Resource Group. She began work on campus July 19.

At Stanford, Clay was responsible for managing the Engineering Library collections, Web pages, reference services and staff, in addition to conducting long-range facilities planning. Her duties as head of the resource group included coordinating the needs of seven science and engineering branch libraries in the Stanford University Libraries system.

With more than 10 years of experience as an academic librarian, Clay is familiar with some of the most recent trends in academic libraries. One of her immediate goals in her position at EOU is to begin the planning stages for a new library on campus.

“We’ve already had some focus groups and discussions to try and get a feeling for what people want to see in a new library, and I’m looking forward to analyzing the results of those discussions,” Clay said.

“Pierce Library staff have done a really great job of keeping up to date with electronic resources,” she said. “I want to make sure we keep up this effort and keep on advertising our electronic resources to our students and faculty, particularly our distance education students.”

Clay holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, a master’s degree in engineering from the University of British Columbia, and a master’s in library information studies from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

Clay can be reached at (541) 962-3792 or at kclay@eou.edu.