Carlie Pracht
Managing Editor
Walking into the warm, welcoming environment of the Butler Community College’s L.W. Nixon Library, new Instruction and Reference Librarian Kim Veliz can be found in her office in the left corner. Veliz will greet you with a kind, welcoming smile. Veliz, from Garden City, but originally California, graduated from Kansas Univerity with a major in linguistics, but later went to school at Emporia State where she earned her master’s degree.
Veliz spent a lot of her time studying in the library before she even knew what she wanted her profession to be.
“Honestly, I didn’t even know it existed (this profession) until I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do right after I graduated,” Veliz said. “I used to spend all my time in the library studying, and it was just a really nice place to be and I thought ‘maybe I could work here’ and so that’s why I decided to go to library school and realized I really liked it.”
Veliz worked as a graduate assistant at the Emporia State library where she taught freshman English classes. Students would come into the library where they would teach them what they needed to know about the library to work on their papers, which is similar to what she does now at Butler.
“I think Butler is a little bit more tight knit,” Veliz said. “You definitely get to interact more because the class sizes are a little bit smaller, so when people come into the library and they also come into the classroom, you kind of recognize them and you get to see them and be like ‘hey, how was your paper how did it turn out?’ and stuff like that.”
When looking for a job, Veliz knew that she wanted to stay in Kansas and wanted to stay close to where she was and discovered after interviewing with Butler that it was a good fit.
“Everyone was really nice and I thought, ‘Wow, if I worked here it would probably be a fun place to be,’ so that was definitely one of the reasons why I decided here,” Veliz said.
Any students looking for instruction can go to the L.W. Nixon Library and find Veliz for help.
“If you’re going to do a research paper you can come to the library, and we’ll walk you through how to do that stuff,” Veliz said.
