Welcome

My name is Karen Sobel, and I am a research and instruction librarian at the Auraria Library in downtown Denver, Colorado. The Auraria Library serves the populations of the University of Colorado Denver (my official employer), Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the Community College of Denver, as well as the public.

At Auraria, I perform library instruction sessions for freshman composition, the first-year experience, English as a Second Language, psychology, and English literature courses. I also coordinate AskAuraria, our in-house virtual reference service. I manage the creation of Auraria's LibGuides course and subject guides.

I hold a Master of Science in Library Science and a Master of Arts in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have also earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with honors, plus a minor in Psychology, from the Pennsylvania State University. I want to thank both of those institutions for teaching me things that matter, and for never letting me take the easy way out. Mentors in both of my Master's programs taught me to teach, and to teach well. Both of my English programs gave me a solid background in postcolonial literature -- my passion -- as well as all the beautiful literatures leading up to it. Penn State gave me an interdisciplinary education. I studied and worked in the UK and India, took physics and physiology, rehearsed with musical groups nearly every day, took three courses in crunching statistics, and learned astronomy on icy nights at the university's observatory. It really was the most remarkable training for a reference librarian.

Would you like to get in touch? Please send me an email using the contact form. I'm always up for discussing instruction, virtual reference, and good stuff like books and hiking.