Chair
International Relations Round Table
Dr. Muzhgan Nazarova’s career (http://bit.ly/MNazresume) as a seasoned international library and information science professional and educator spans almost four decades, including her present tenure at the Library of Congress (LOC) and foreign service with the US State Department at the US Embassy in Baku in the past. Through her professional work and service in different types of the libraries including academic (Duke University Library, Main Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Walter Davis Academic Library at UNC Chapel Hill), public (Cleveland Public Library) and special libraries including medical (Azerbaijan State Medical Library), population research library (Carolina Population Center Library), government agency (USIA/US State Department Information Resource Center) and federal/national (Library of Congress) she was able to gain expertise in different areas of librarianship including library administration and management, reference services, collection development, acquisitions and cataloging.
In her current position as the Turkic Languages Librarian in the Middle East (ME) Section of the Asian and Middle Eastern (ASME) Division of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access (ABA) Directorate of the LOC’s Library Services. Dr. Nazarova is responsible for acquisitions and cataloging of the materials from all Central Asian Republics and Azerbaijan in their native and Russian languages in Latin and Cyrillic scripts. She is also responsible for Mongolian acquisitions and provides cataloging for a number of other Turkic languages of the small nations of Russia.
A native of Azerbaijan, Dr. Nazarova is the first librarian in the country with a population of approximately 10 million with 12.000 libraries to receive the MLS and Ph.D. degrees from the top library schools in North America. She received her Ph.D. from the iSchool at Illinois, and MLS degree from the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS). Muzhgan also holds a Certificate in Management with concentration in Information Management from the Nottingham Trent University Business School in UK.
Dr. Nazarova is one of the founders of the Azerbaijani Library Association (AzLA) and was one of the initiators of the partnership projects between ALA and library associations in the South Caucasus including Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, and coordinated/participated in a number of joint projects and professional workshops held in these countries.
Through her engagement in research, scholarship, teaching, and service at the iSchool at Illinois Dr. Nazarova was able to contribute to the development of the field of library and information science and scholarship of teaching and learning.
In her role as a research coordinator for Inquiry Page (IP) and Community Inquiry Labs (CIL) she was part of the team to start “Community Informatics” program (”Understanding how local communities and people in their everyday lives use and might use information technology, in libraries and elsewhere”) at the Ischool at Illinois and worked closely with the East St Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP) in East St. Louis, IL and Paseo Boricua (Puerto-Rican Community Center) in Chicago, IL. The experience gained from participating in these projects became the basis for her doctoral research.
In her dissertation “Service learning and career development: A case study in library and information science” she investigated different impacts of the service-learning experience in relation to careers and career development of the 11 cohorts of MLS graduates at the iSchool at Illinois.
After completing her Ph.D., Muzhgan spent 9 months in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan conducting a research on the role of regional libraries as community information centers as an IARO (Individual Advanced Research Opportunities) fellow - the program sponsored by the US State Department and run by the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX).
Muzhgan is an active leader in the library profession with a long record of engaging in and supporting library advocacy and international librarianship through over two decades of active involvement with ALA as a member IRC and IRRT chairing and participating in different committees (Preconference, International Connections, Eurasia and Central Asia, Europe etc.). Dr. Nazarova also had the opportunity to work closely with the international librarians from over 40 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and Middle East through her work at the Mortenson Center for International Librarianship and IFLA as well. Dr. Nazarova has served as an external review panelist for the ALA’s Accreditation Committee. She was also elected as ALA’s Councilor-at-Large for 2016-2019 term and will be running for the second term. She has been active in ACRL and served as a chair of Slavic and East European Section’s (SEES)Automated Bibliographic Control (ABC) committee and group leader for Slavic Cataloging Manual project.
Dr. Nazarova is one of the founders of the Azerbaijani Library Association (AzLA) and was one of the initiators of the partnership projects between ALA and library associations in the South Caucasus including Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, and coordinated/participated in a number of joint projects and professional workshops held in these countries.
International Librarians Networking Program (Poster 17)
Sunday, June 25, 2023
9:30 AM – 11:00 AM CT