Remembering Stan Olson

 Former Alloway Librarian Stan Olson passed away in May.  At his memorial service, University Librarian Ted Goshulak spoke about Stan’s service to the library and shared comments about Stan, gathered from his coworkers.

Over the thirty-two years in which Stan served in the TWU Library, the library profession transformed; from one relying on card catalogues to one connecting to online resources across the globe. And Stan,  with his technical expertise,  was central to this revolution. His grasp of both the larger picture and the minute details made his contribution invaluable as we migrated into the twenty-first century.

Even now, ten years after his retirement, as I walk around the Library there are traces of Stan’s contributions to our mission of meeting the information needs of our faculty, staff, and students.

When I asked my staff to describe Stan, the professional librarian, these are a few of the comments I received:

• Extremely invested in his work in the Library
• An obvious love of books; but even more, a strong desire to connect these resources with our students
• Stan had an oversized capacity for detail
• I would just say that Stan was not detail-oriented, he was meticulously detail-oriented and it served us well
• He had the ability to take complicated concepts and explain them clearly
• Stan left his mark in so many ways on the Library, especially in Technical Services
• I still find work files, containing ancient, handwritten logs that Stan had kept for years and years
• A model of environmental thrift

I would be remiss not to mention our faculty/staff lunchtime volleyball games held in the Enarson Gym. These were rousing times of physical activity and social interaction. Stan was the keeper of statistics and the rule enforcer  –  and a great volleyball player!

Stan was a lifelong learner. He was a quiet man at work, but his energy and passion for the environment and nature would just glow when he entered a room.

I, and, all those who knew Stan at TWU will miss his long and detailed explanations of all things:  from library acquisitions to birds and dragonflies to New Testament theology. He was truly a renaissance man.