Librarians

Oak Park librarian Kay Desio won't be shushing noisy patrons Monday night. They'll be throwing her a retirement party. The 67-year-old Desio, who is leaving the small community library where she has worked since it opened 12 years ago, will be the guest of honor at a reception given by Friends of the Oak Park Library from 7 to 9 p.m. at the library. Patrons will be asked to honor Desio by "sponsoring" children's books that will be added to the collection.

UC Irvine's controversial head librarian, who was scheduled to retire on Monday, will remain on the job indefinitely while a committee keeps looking for a successor, officials said Friday. Chief librarian Calvin J. Boyer has been asked to stay on the job "because we are not ready for an orderly transition," conceded William H. Parker, vice chancellor for academic affairs.

The local branch of the Orange County Public Library has a new senior librarian. Mary Ann Hutton was appointed in June to replace Su Chung, who has moved to the Garden Grove regional library. County Librarian John Adams has appointed three other branch administrators, including Paula Bruce, who took over Hutton's former job as head of the Mission Viejo branch. Cheryl Weinberg was named administrative librarian in La Palma, and Elke Faraci will head the Stanton branch.

Two librarians from South Gate Junior High won a prestigious education award Wednesday for their efforts to encourage parents and children to read. Ruby Ling-Louie and Dale Buboltz are among 10 national winners of the 1992 Reader's Digest American Heroes in Education award. Ling-Louie and Buboltz will each receive $2,500. The school receives $10,000, which Principal Peter Ferry said would be spent to enhance library services.

Responding to a highly critical report on alleged bias in the UC Irvine library, the library's chief administrator Tuesday said he disagreed with most of the study's conclusions but urged his staff to view it as "a catalyst" to improve conditions in the department. Calvin Boyer, head librarian at UCI, devoted much of his annual "State of the Library" address to the report issued last Friday.

When a man with an underground house called to ask what kind of air conditioner he should install, Anne Head didn't flinch. She researched and answered the question, then shrugged it off. It wasn't a particularly strange request, she said. After 18 years as a reference librarian, Head has heard stranger.

Joanne R. Euster, head librarian at UC Irvine, said she will retire effective Sept. 1. Euster, who joined the university in 1992, has been responsible for development of several library facilities on campus. She played a major role in opening the Science Library in 1994; renovating the Medical Center Library in 1995; and seismic retrofitting and renovating the Main Library, which reopened in January after six months of construction.

Orange County's head librarian, who earned a reputation for cultivating multi-ethnic library services for a changing public, has been selected as Los Angeles' city librarian. Elizabeth Martinez Smith, 47, is the first Latino to direct the city's 63-branch system. She was appointed to the position, with its $105,000 annual salary, after a nationwide search to replace Wyman Jones, who resigned to go into publishing.

It wasn't the flashers that rattled librarian Joseph Bearse in his 24 years at the local branch library. Nor was it the boy who photocopied his privates on a library machine. And it wasn't the heart attack victim either. "He just fell suddenly, near Biographies," recalled Bearse, who himself had quadruple heart bypass surgery 10 years ago. "The paramedics came and got him."

It was a historian's nightmare. During the change from the Clinton to the Bush administration, websites affiliated with the Clinton White House went dark, and an unknown number of online documents and files were forever lost. Such Internet deaths inspired the Cyber Cemetery at the University of North Texas, which preserves government websites in their final form. The Cyber Cemetery archives sites when commissions or panels expire, allowing the online work of defunct government bodies to live on and remain accessible to the public.