Getting to know: RMSLA Director Connie Clem
Where do you live?
Niwot, Colorado
Where do you work, and what’s your title?
I’m the owner/principal at Clem Information Strategies.
What’s the mission of your organization?
CIS creates change through information for government and nonprofit clients. My main focus is justice and corrections, including the human services fields that are connected with justice-involved people or that relate to prevention and rehabilitation – community health and mental health, housing, employment, women’s services. . . This year I’m celebrating 30 years in corrections information. (Wow!)
When did you become an SLA/RMSLA member?
I had to check the SLA site for this one. It says 2003. But I think it was 1996, in time for the conference in Boston.
What drew you into an information career?
When I got out of college with a biology degree, I wanted to do research, but not the kind that happens in a laboratory. (Electrophoresis was fine, but for a lifetime? Admittedly, I didn’t know what topics had the day’s most riveting lab research.) Information environments drew me. Turn a few pages and I was working in a federal information center in acquisitions, learning about the types of information our varied clientele needed to make their organizations more effective. This led me to information-sharing and research projects, publishing, web development, and supporting online communities. We were so thrilled to get our Inmagic library catalog online in 1998! And it was an adventure to publish some of our research databases online after that.
What’s the best thing about being an information professional?
For me, the fact that you can do so many different things within the ”information” umbrella. You can work with people or code or both. You can find and distill new information to make it easy for end-users to act on it. You can make information findable online. You can develop your tech skills and juggle multiple projects at once.
What’s the next great thing you want to learn?
I would love to study how people apply and use information once they’ve got their hands on the good stuff. But that’s a little abstract. What I’ll actually learn next depends on where my projects this year take me.
Are you a member of any other professional associations?
A few of them include the American Jail Association, the American Correctional Association, the Colorado Nonprofit Association, and the Association of Independent Information Professionals.
What do you love to do in your non-work time?
Being out in the garden I have my best ideas. I collect tough native and xeriscape perennial plants that manifest amazing beauty right here in our semi-arid climate. (It’s my inner biologist.) I have orchids in a sunroom to get me through the winter. I’ve been through a quilting phase, I like to cook Indian and Moroccan food, and through the talents of my husband have remodeled two houses, going on three. Once in a while we still get out for a mountain hike or camping trip. I practice yoga, and there are always 5 or 10 books next to my pillow.
Tell us something about yourself that we’d never think to ask.
I am the former holder of records in South Dakota AAU and college swimming. Mainly the 100 meter butterfly. Looking at the times people are posting now, I just slink away. Also, I’m a middle child with four brothers.
What’s your favorite thing about SLA and/or the Rocky Mountain Chapter?
Meeting new people and realizing we all have that passion for recognizing precious or pivotal information. So many people here are givers and sharers, and there are vast amounts of creativity and expertise. Being on the RMSLA board has made me appreciate the generosity of people who make associations work. Everything anyone does for SLA or our chapter – whether a big or small gesture – really makes a difference. It all adds up.
Follow Us!