VGCC Library Director selected to present professional paper at conference

Vance-Granville Community College Director of Library Services Elaine Stem (pictured above) was recently selected to present a paper at the joint conference of the (SELA) and the Georgia Council of Media Organizations (COMO), as this year’s “New Voices” presenter. The conference was held Oct. 5-7 in Athens, Georgia, bringing together librarians from 12 states, including North Carolina.

Stem’s paper was entitled “Censorship: Filtering Content on the Web.” The SELA “New Voices” program provides an opportunity for professional librarians with less than five years of experience to present and publish their ideas or perspectives on current library issues. Every two years, just one librarian is selected from across all 12 states to present the New Voices paper at the conference. The winning paper will also be published in the peer-reviewed SELA journal, The Southeastern Librarian, and the author receives a $150 honorarium sponsored by EBSCO.

In her paper, Stem discussed how web content filters work, as well as the arguments for and against content filtering. Stem said that COMO/SELA Conference attendees from public libraries in Arkansas and in South Carolina were particularly interested in VGCC’s approach to content filtering in the library. VGCC uses a software called Barracuda Web Security Gateway to successfully filter online content.

Stem has been a member of the VGCC staff since 2006 and director of library services since 2015. Prior to joining the college, she worked in the newspaper industry for over 15 years. She worked with The News and Observer in Raleigh and then in 2000 moved to the Interactive News Division of the McClatchy Company, the newspaper’s parent company. Stem has a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MBA from Meredith College, and is set to be awarded her Master of Library Science (MLS) degree from East Carolina University in December 2016.

The main VGCC library is located in Building 2 on the college’s Main Campus in Vance County, but library services are also available at the satellite campuses in Granville, Franklin and Warren counties, and online at lrc.vgcc.edu . For more information about the Library, contact Elaine Stem at (252) 738-3340 or steme@vgcc.edu .