Mary Jo Zeter
Career Achievement

For her long and varied contributions and wide leadership, we award a 2021 Career Achievement Award to Mary Jo Zeter.  Until her retirement, Mary Jo served for more than twenty years as the MSU Libraries’ bibliographer, subject librarian and liaison for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and for Iberian Spain and Portugal.  She served as the Area Studies collections coordinator for ten years. As liaison, she worked closely with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center, the Department of Romance and Classical Studies, and interested faculty from across the campus.  For those scholars, she was a trusted partner in the Libraries, engaging at a high level with faculty for collection needs, in-depth research support, and library instruction.

In the Libraries, Mary Jo developed deep and nuanced collections, not only acquiring materials from overseas (including buying trips to Chile, the Amazon and other areas) but also attending to cataloging records for a well-developed and navigable catalog.  She was an early adopter of the Kanopy service to bring streaming video resources to users.  She was  heavily involved with the Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections to incorporate Latin American and Caribbean materials and to use these materials in the classroom.  Mary Jo helped in the acquisition of a significant collection of Jorge Luis Borges materials, including manuscripts, first editions, recordings, ephemera and photographs.

In professional service, Mary Jo was deeply in the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), the association for Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies librarians.  She contributed to many projects and initiatives, and served on committees addressing Special Collections and Archives, Marginalized Peoples and Ideas, and Interlibrary Cooperation.  As long-time co-chair, she built up SALALM’S Scholarship Committee, and served on the Executive Board.  Her involvement in SALALM connected MSU to a larger cooperative focused on Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian studies and established MSU’s place within this network.