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Five Questions: Kelly Miller

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Kelly Miller moved to Springfield to take the business librarian position this month at the Springfield-Greene County Library District. Miller spent five years at the Kansas City Public Library.

Q: What is your role as a business librarian?
A: I’ll be helping people in the library with the business resources, online databases and print material. People come in with questions about starting a new business, or personal finance or investing or finding a job, and those are the kinds of questions I’ll be fielding here. I’ll also be doing a lot of work making contacts within the community and just getting out there and promoting what the library can be doing for businesses.

Q: What are some resources the library has to offer businesspeople?
A: People are so used to going to the Internet for information, but we want to tell people that the library subscribes to really great online database resources that they can use. These are resources that have been vetted and are very reliable and provide really powerful information to people who might be wanting to start up a business, for example. … There’s one database, called Business Decision that’s great for market research. … Reference USA is great for finding contacts and information on a business. I’ve heard it referred to as the White Pages – let’s say on caffeine.

Q: What are some ways to learn more about those resources?
A: First, there is an online component if you want to check that out before you even come into the library. From our Web site, you can go into research and onto the business page, are there is a lot of information right there. It links you to our databases and it links you to our curated Web sites that we have set aside for our business research. People can come in, they can meet with us here, they can make an appointment with me and I’ll be able to show them what we have, and in kind of a tailored way, too.

Q: Before you worked at the K.C. library, you worked at an advertising agency. What did you do and how will that help you with this position?
A: I worked at Barkley Evergreen in Kansas City. We were the agency of record for Sonic Drive In. I worked on the team that produced all the ads for Sonic Drive In and it was the whole Two Guys campaign.  … We actually did some research that I feel probably could have been helped by using some of the business resources I’m working with now at library. We looked a lot at demographics and our target market.

Q: For two summers, you taught English to Korean children. How did that experience impact you?
A: That was through the University of Missouri. They had a partnership with the Korean government. I went over there with 70 other Americans to do some summer camps in Korea the last two years. . … I think the main thing I got out of that was just being able to adapt to any circumstance. Anything that comes along, I can handle it.[[In-content Ad]]

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