He was a longtime friend, as well as a professional colleague, and his loss still seems unreal and shocking, just as it had when I first learned of his passing. In many ways, he was the ultimate library professional. He was Branch Chief & Information Architect at NIH/U.S. National Institutes of Health library, in Bethesda, Maryland, not far from where I live. He was a true leader in the library world, especially through his intense involvement with SLA/Special Libraries Association.
Among other things, he was president of the Washington, D.C. chapter in 2010, and provided leadership and service on many board/committee initiatives on the national level for SLA and related library and information science organizations, winning multiple awards. He had a sound grasp of technology and technological issues, and their implications for libraries worldwide. He was a future-oriented visionary, and one of the profession’s most accomplished networkers.
I first met James in 2001, when he was my student in the Special Libraries class I teach at Catholic University’s Department of Library and Information Science. He already was an experienced librarian, working at the Naval Research Library. We remained friends, and in many subsequent years he was generous with his time in returning to my class to deliver a guest lecture on the value of membership and involvement in SLA. The students consistently found him to be inspirational, and he always shared his contact info with them, as well as his presentation slides. James also wrote incisive papers for SLA’s publication Information Outlook, which I often included in my syllabus.
At the 2018 SLA annual conference in Baltimore, James and his colleagues presented on what turned out to be an extremely timely topic: “Good, Bad, and Ugly Germs: Perspectives on the Centennial Remembrance of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.” You can read more about his research in his 2010 paper “Building the Pandemic Influenza Digital Archive (PIDA) at the National Institutes of Health Library ,” for Sci-Tech News. Also quite interesting is his January-February 2019 article for Computers in Libraries, “National Institutes of Health: Emerging Technologies at the NIH Library.”
You can learn more about various facets of James’ life, especially his professional career, at the SLA page In Memoriam: James King, his LinkedIn page, and in his obituary (I knew he was named R. James King, but never knew the R. stood for Richard). The details about his wide involvement in areas outside of work, plus his devotion to his family, explain why he always seemed to be in a good mood, and maintained a positive outlook. His intense yet good-natured spirit will be an ongoing source of inspiration.
In a 2013 post for SLA on non-traditional career paths for information professionals and librarianship, James wrote the following: “Ultimately, to succeed in a non-traditional path, we should understand our skills and goals, apply the wisdom of the past to today’s opportunities, work through safe harbors like SLA to expand our skills and competencies, and take risks to innovate in our career and organizations.” Earlier in the post he writes that it is “difficult to provide more than generic advice. What has worked for me is to first of all know myself. My current job may be a joy to me but torture to the next person so knowing what my interests are, where my talents/skills lie, what level of autonomy I enjoy, and what I can actually make a living doing all have brought me to where I am now. Given the amount of time I spend on professional pursuits each week, I personally want to be doing something I enjoy with a purpose far more than I want to be making millions of dollars a year doing something I dread.”
Richard James King leaves a tremendous legacy as a role model for a profession undergoing profound change, and for librarians and information professionals in need of sound guidance for an uncertain future.