Martha Holguin

Employed for nine years as a Faculty Librarian at El Paso Community College (EPCC), was tenured in 1994 and appointed as Head Librarian for two years. The transition aligned with core values to serve with honor, vision, accountability, and pride. Pride in her determination to work hard and remain focused on students’ success. Determination because she was once a Community College student, working forty hours a week and raising a child as a single parent. Strength and disciplined in her ability to succeed was her badge of honor. The diverse knowledge and experience to empower students to excel academically in collaboration with fellow colleagues defined her core values, along with policies and procedures. She fostered a teamwork spirit, strengthen and streamline processes for library instruction, library skills, orientations, and engaged with students to help them feel at ease while performing research or working with computer equipment, web-based databases, and automated catalogs. Emerging technologies played a pivotal role in research with improved innovations coming of age. Staying abreast of these empowering technologies was key to helping students and faculty. In her professional tenure she witnessed those innovations from thumbing through index cards to finding and locating library material, to automated systems that improved retrieval of valuable information for research papers. Training was also key in helping faculty and students navigate and understand these new innovative systems, along with stand-alone computer aided technology improvements. In an age fluttered with information at our fingertips today students are engulfed with the coming of AI generated technology. Again, feeling the same fear and anxiety for use, implementation, and innovation. Librarians have always been there to facilitate and provide instruction on the use of leading-edge innovations to help a community at large understand its value. 

Defined by community outreach Martha wrote grants to enhance learning. She wrote a grant to create a library literacy center inside the Clardy Fox Branch Library while working as branch manager for the City of El Paso. The grant was awarded for three years where community users interested in learning English as a second language could attend classes, use audio cassettes and checkout bilingual literary aides. The center was incorporated as a part of the city's library department and continues to flourish today. She developed a library card art contest in celebration of Dia de los Niños, a library card still in use today at the Sunland Park Community Library in NM. She coordinated efforts with surrounding elementary school children and VIP celebrities from the city to choose the winning entry. The theme was to define in picture what the library looks like to them. It was the pride of their community to have the winning picture on the library card.

She also created a (TLA) Texas Library Association Spanish Services to the Spanish Speaking Round Table to introduce Hispanic Authors and their work at TLA yearly conference, a valuable inclusion of service to Texas libraries and librarians. She was honored with the Librarian of the Year from REFORMA El Paso Chapter in recognition for outstanding contributions to library services in 1994, she served on the TLA Board as member at-large, is recognized by the (PAHO) Pan American Health and (WHO) World Health Organization in recognition of her valuable contribution to the success of her team and to the mission of the organization. She traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil for a seven-day training session to learn how to upload PAHO and WHO document in Spanish, Portuguese and English. She also received an employee of the quarter recognition from (BECC) Border Environmental Cooperation Commission in recognition of the creation of a Documentation Library in Ciudad Juarez, CHIH, Mexico, a United States-Mexico Border initiative to share information on water and wastewater project documents online. She organized, cataloged, and uploaded certified water and wastewater project documents for easier access by the United States and Mexican border communities.