Welcome

• Home
• Photos
• Links
• Quotes
• Portfolio
• Contact Info
• Resume
• Jim Tuttle
• NCSU Webcam
• Duke Webcam

About Me

Well Hello! For those of you who don't know me...
I was born and raised in Illinois. Nevertheless, it was not what I would call uneventful. I mostly grew up in a small town called Effingham, which is in central Illinois in between St. Louis, MO and Indianapolis, IN. I attended Lake Land College for an Associates Degree in Sociology. I then transferred to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), about an hour away from Effingham, to pursue my Bachelors Degree in Anthropology and Sociology. In 2000, I met Jim Carpinella who was also studying Anthropology (and happened to live very near me!). We began dating while on a trip to Oahu, Hawaii (his last home). We married on May 24, 2002.

I then went on to study Library and Information Science at UIUC. I graduated with my Masters in 2004. While Jim finished his graduate work, I worked as the Reference Librarian at the Helen Matthes Library in Effingham and was a literacy volunteer. After his internship and graduation, we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina early 2005. In February, I began working for the North Carolina State University Libraries. Working in Systems, I assisted with their website migration project. I converted so many webpages to the new format, I can't even begin to count! Next, I worked on a grant project (Living off the Land) in the NCSU Special Collections Research Center. I was involved in all areas of the grant: research (1850-1950 time period), selection, metadata creation, digitization and general workflow.

January 2006, I began at Duke University Medical Library as an Information & Education Services Librarian. Now I am focusing on understanding our medical databases, medical terminology, and EBM (evidence based medicine). I work with medical students, residents, physicians, nurses, researchers...you name it. I provide general reference and conduct searches as well as teach classes for the Duke medical community.

Jim works for NC State University as the Geospatial Data Librarian under a Library of Congress grant called NDIIPP. We just bought our first house! (No pictures up yet on my site, but check it out on Jim's site. We are proudly down to one car so Jim drops me off at work and then drives a few miles to downtown Durham's Tobacco District and parks in a parking garage and gets on a TTA (Triangle Transit Authority) bus which takes him straight to Raleigh where the bus stop is convenienently NCSU library. And to make this commute even better, NCSU pays for his way and parking to encourage people choosing mass-transit.

My “spare” time is taken by reading, hand drumming (African, Cuban, Latin), yoga classes, exploring North Carolina, enjoying nature, and playing with my wonderful felines. I've volunteered with the Wake county animal shelter and I'm trying to get involved with the local IMC (Chapel Hill) (still missing Urbana-Champaign's UC-IMC, where I was a radical librarian for several years). I'm a vegan, an animal rights activist, part of the zine scene, and a radicalibrarian.

Some of the wilder things I've done include being a truck driver (88M) for the Army National Guard for four years, skydiving at 14,000ft, parasailing in Hawaii, backpacking parts of Europe, white water kayaking with my husband on the Nantahala River, and handgliding at Kill Devil Hill (where the Wright Brothers first took flight)...at 2000ft! I prefer to spend my summers at the beach. Jim and I bought some boards and I really took a beating by the ocean! Winter has been nonexistant since we moved here two years ago! Really miss snow. I love winter and snow and I'm hoping we get some next winter. I will say that spring is really beautiful here in North Carolina! I'd say even better than Illinois. More flowers. The next year will be taken up with fun house projects, volunteer work, and visiting my dad.

The cats...Joey, Zuzu, & Siva

Adopt your own here.