Sika Berger Retires After 34 Year Career With Smith College Libraries

After more than 34 years of service, one of Smith College Libraries’ most veteran employees bids farewell on July 31.

Sika Berger has seen it all in the techno-sphere — at the start of her Smith career as a documents and reference librarian, no website existed for the Libraries (or even the college, for that matter!). Now, the libraries boast an online repository of hundreds of thousands of books, digital archival materials, and multimedia resources available with the click of a mouse or the tap of an index finger.

“In the 90s, everyone was saying, ‘The internet changes everything,’ she says. “At Smith, I was an organizer around the idea of making webpages. It was a big deal to get everybody up to speed and engaged. We asked ourselves, ‘What are we going to do? We’ve got to have a website.’”

The student workers who assist Sika in the User Experience (UX) Lab in Alumnae Gymnasium may not realize the extent to which Sika and other pioneers of the dot-com era stood at the forefront, as higher education scrambled to keep up with the onslaught of tech booms in the 90s and early 2000s: gone were the days where patrons sought only physical books and card catalogs; expectations surrounding e-resources, internet databases, and multimedia exploded, and librarians were left to navigate cyberspace in real time.

Sika was all too eager to accept this challenge and called on the Libraries to do the same. “When I came to Smith in 1990, I had to beg for a computer,” she recalls. “We had just one computer for our entire reference group!”

An early adopter of the personal computer, Sika understood the potential and inevitable necessity of digital literacy in the library. “I saw the possibilities of linking to our materials online,” she says. “I was already working with some of the IT staff. We had a group called the Technology Training Coordinating Committee and we treated the Libraries as a learning organization. We adopted principles of wanting to give people the time to learn skills, maybe not even strictly related to our jobs, but to expand our knowledge of what was going on.”

As part of the daunting transition to the digital world, Sika, in collaboration with Libraries reference workers, led the efforts for some of the first online user experience tests, when the Libraries made the leap from physical to electronic content.

“The simplest version of the website just linked to a CD-ROM network and our catalog, with a few other web resources,” she says. “We went from having physical, multi-page booklets of resources for each subject, to putting them online. Later, we did some user experience with pathfinders for the classes, as everybody was just replicating what they did in paper online. That UX really helped.”

Sika’s piqued interest for next-gen technology and user experience drove her career in the Libraries. In 2007, she became the Digital Services Coordinator and was chosen to lead the Smith College Libraries Digital Services Team (DST), a group that adopted a strategy called “Learning Library 2.0.” The concept centered around “Web 2.0,” an idea that promoted the use of online communities like social media and wikis to facilitate collaboration between users.

“I had a coach to really get me through the start of the DST and how to lead the team,” she recalls. “For me, it was like being an informal leader for the whole Libraries. It was very democratic and we got sub-groups from all different parts of the library involved.”

Elements of Sika's work within the DST were integral to a major proposal she drafted with a small group from the Libraries and Educational Technology, the Virtual Learning Commons (VLC). The plan proposed that the VLC would provide an infrastructure for a Smith College community “dedicated to learning, teaching, scholarship, discovery, creativity, and critical thought” and predicted what lay ahead in the digital landscape, arguing, “Lost opportunities abound when students cannot access information in their preferred learning environment. Smith College needs to move forward in order to participate in national and international initiatives for digital scholarship.”

In 2014, Sika transitioned once again and became the Libraries’ first and only UX Librarian. She has gleaned from her decades of relevant knowledge to lead the Libraries’ user experience initiatives, with a focus on continuously improving online and physical experiences across services and collections. In this role, Sika notes her time on the Digital Services Team prepared her well.

“When someone has a problem, the DST taught me to ask, ‘What's the low-hanging fruit? What is something you want to plan towards? What kind of data do you want to collect?’ she says.  “When you're ready to make a change, how do you do that?”

Sika asserts her student assistants have also been instrumental to user experience success, and has appreciated the evolution of their role within the Libraries. “My student assistants have been so terrific,” she says. “It was quite different when I was a documents librarian for all those years. Students would be shelving and typing, and it became a different kind of relationship when we started doing UX work.”

Some of Sika’s favorite moments in her last years at Smith were outside of the UX Lab and surrounded by students, where she, her colleagues, and her student workers would collect feedback in fun and engaging ways.

“When we were redoing our website, we asked students to draw their ideal homepage,” she recalls. “When we were trying to determine what the website should look like, we gave them a sheet full of descriptive words and asked them to answer, ‘How does the library make you feel?’ Their responses then morphed into the beginnings of user involvement in the website.”

Sika’s curiosity for the last 34 years has pushed her to continually reexamine what the Libraries’ digital presence can be. From the Libraries’ humble web launch on a 28.8kbs modem, to the slick Drupal 10 site with integrated search engine used today, Sika’s collaborations with students, faculty, and fellow Smith colleagues have played a prominent role in the Libraries’ digital success.

“There's often a tendency to think you know people, why they do things. All along, I have tried to make data accessible to people, so we can understand the truth and use it in the most effective way,” she says. “Teaching and working with students and faculty has been key to understanding the importance of finding out what users do and need.”

Sika’s last day at Smith College is July 31, 2024.