Jessamyn West

Jessamyn Charity West (born September 5, 1968) is an American library technologist and writer known for her activism and work on the digital divide.

She is the creator of librarian.net.

He was the key figure in the 1981 Tracy Kidder book The Soul of a New Machine.

Her mother, Elizabeth (née Cohon), was the younger sister of actor Peter Coyote.

She may be named after the author Jessamyn West (according to her parents, a "coincidence"), and as a child corresponded with her.

She graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst.

In 1995, West went to Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where she ran a library for the Freedom Forum.

West works as a freelance library consultant, mainly in Orange County, Vermont, focusing on helping libraries with technology.

She moderated the group blog

She has staffed information desks at Burning Man and the 1999 WTO protests, and supported and maintained the Internet Archive's Open Library project.

West briefly signed up as a researcher for Google Answers, writing about her experience for the journal Searcher.

She resigned after finding she had probably violated her contract by writing about the service.

She believed that "the money factor" skewed the relationship between the researcher and consumer of information, and played a part in the service's later demise.

Librarian.net, which she founded in 1999 after finding the domain name unused, has become a "widely read and cited" resource.

West characterizes librarian.net as generally "anti-censorship, pro-freedom of speech, pro-porn (for lack of a better way to explain that we don't find the naked body shameful), anti-globalization, anti-outsourcing, anti-Dr. Laura, pro-freak, pro-social responsibility, and just generally pro-information and in favor of the profession getting a better image."

In 2002, Library Journal named her a "mover and shaker" of the library world.

West is considered an "opinion maker" in the profession and presents frequently at conferences.

She completed graduate work at the University of Washington for a Master of Librarianship degree, and moved back to Vermont in 2003.

West was one of about three dozen "credentialed bloggers" at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the first time that such an event issued press credentials to bloggers.

She indicated in a New York Times feature on the group that her goal was making "the librarian voice in politics stronger and louder."

Her first-day quip that the convention was "Burning Man for Democrats, without the nudity or drugs" was widely reported.

She is the Vermont Chapter Councilor of the American Library Association, and was Director of Operations at the group blog MetaFilter from 2005 to 2014.

West owns MetaFilter.

West grew up in Massachusetts, where her father, computer engineer Tom West, worked for RCA and Data General.

In 2007, West made a YouTube video of herself installing Ubuntu on two library computers, which attracted thousands of views and requests for free CDs from Canonical.

DesktopLinux.com called it a "non-jaded, non-techie look at Ubuntu."

Cory Doctorow, writing on the blog Boing Boing, dubbed her an "internet folk hero", and brought the video 14,000 views in a day and a half.

West describes herself as a "collectivist kind of anarchist."

In June 2011 she joined the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board.

MetaFilter, retiring as Director of Operations in 2014.

She

continues to be active answering questions in Ask MetaFilter.

She is also an active Wikipedian, working particularly on Vermont and library topics.

From 2016 to 2018, West taught library and information science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Since 2018, she has been a qualifying authority for the Internet Archive.

In a 2022 interview on the Slate (magazine) podcast, "Working," she described herself as a "rural tech evangelist" who is committed to helping to alleviate the digital divide.

In 2023 West joined the Flickr Commons Program as Community Manager.

In 2019 she gave the 30th Alice G. Smith Lecture for the School of Information at the University of South Florida in Tampa at the Robert W. Saunders Sr. Public Library titled, "Social justice is a library issue; libraries are a social justice issue".

She addressed challenges faced by people in rural communities on The Takeaway podcast in September 2019, "How Libraries Are Bridging the Digital Divide".

She is a self-described anti-capitalist.