April/May 2002

Spotlight On ...

Nancy Bode

Nancy grew up in Gibson City, Illinois, where her parents still reside, and graduated from Eastern Illinois University with a degree in elementary education.  Upon graduation she worked in a middle school and also part-time at a public library, which whetted her desire to pursue a "real" library position.  She can pinpoint her interest in working in a library to her family's move from a smaller town to Gibson City where she discovered the town's Moyer Library.  She has many memories of walking or riding her bike to the library or taking younger siblings when she had baby-sitting duties.

That "real" library position occurred in 1978 when Nancy's sister spotted an advertisement in the News-Gazette's classified ads for a "technical services clerk" at Parkland College.  The early years involved a great deal of alphabetizing and filing, maintaining records by hand, and even keypunching.  As with most of the jobs at the College, computer technology has changed the method of doing things, but the concepts are the same.  Nancy comments that a "paperless society doesn't exist," and sometimes improvements add steps to the process.

Nancy enjoys working at Parkland College and has enrolled in many classes at the College -- many office careers courses, accounting, math, guitar, computer information and technology, and workshops at the Business Development Center.  She likes the variety that her job offers and gains satisfaction in knowing that the "behind the scenes" activities of the Technical Services office are crucial for the well-running of the Library.  "It is gratifying when students or faculty tell me how pleased they were to receive the book or article that was obtained through interlibrary loan," she says.

Regarding her longevity at Parkland, Nancy ventures to say that Technical Services was "one of the first offices on campus to have a computer that was used daily to conduct business actually in the office."  Nancy likes the direction that the College has taken in its mission of being a "community" college with special programs such as Lifelong Learning, College for Kids, and the Business Training Center.  She feels that Parkland recognizes that not all students learn alike and the College strives to provide resources (Peer Tutoring, the Writing Clinic, for example) for students' success.

When away from her job at Parkland, Nancy, who lives in Champaign with husband John, a computer programmer, and son Patrick, a freshman at Centennial High School, likes playing the piano, doing counted cross-stitch, and visiting historic sites.  She has an interest in U.S. presidents' homes and is also currently interested in studying the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  And those first forays to the public library continue as she weekly visits Champaign Public Library and browses their collection.  Her recreational reading is primarily fiction, and two authors on her current list of favorites are Linda Howard and Karen Robards.  Nancy thanks her parents for scrimping together money for piano lessons, for giving her six siblings whom she calls friends, and for their infinite wisdom and patience.

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