Shush-Free Zone - Where librarians get loud!

In this episode of Shush-Free Zone, host Dawn Brushammar talks with Alison King, career coach, founder of King Career Services, and creator of Leaping Librarians. Alison shares her own journey from academic, public, and school libraries into corporate copy editing and what she has learned from helping other librarians make their own career leaps. They talk about recognizing the transferable skills librarians already have, translating those skills for employers outside the profession, networking

In this episode of Shush-Free Zone, host Dawn Brushammar is joined by Nancy Groves, Chief of Digital Strategy at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya. Nancy's career has taken her from library school to CNN, NPR, the United Nations Library, global social media leadership, and now overseeing the digital strategy that helps communicate some of the world's most important environmental issues. Nancy shares how the same core principles of librarianship such as organizin

In the first episode of Season 2, host Dawn Brushammar is joined by librarian, researcher, author, and technology evangelist Ole Olesen-Bagneux for a wide-ranging conversation about knowledge organization, metadata, semantics, and why library and information science is more relevant today than ever before. Ole shares how a fascination with rare books, computers, and organizing information eventually led him from Library and Information Science into enterprise data, metadata management, and AI.

Season 1 of The Shush-Free Zone is officially wrapped and in this special bonus episode, host Dawn Brushammar looks back at the conversations, career journeys, and unexpected paths that shaped the first season. When Dawn started the podcast, the goal was simple: challenge the outdated stereotype of librarians as quiet people who only work with books. Librarianship has always been about solving problems, connecting people with knowledge, organizing complexity, and helping others find what they

In this episode of Shush-Free Zone, host Dawn Brushammar sits down with Marydee Ojala, Editor-in-Chief of KMWorld magazine, writer, researcher, speaker, and longtime observer of the information and knowledge management profession. Marydee shares her journey from shelving books as a teenager to working in corporate libraries, and ultimately becoming one of the most influential voices covering knowledge management, search, enterprise information, and AI. Along the way, she reflects on the evolu

In this episode of The Shush-Free Zone, host Dawn Brushammar sits down with Nicole Buckenwolf, Senior Staff Ontologist at Spotify, to unpack the invisible knowledge systems shaping how millions of people discover music and audiobooks every day. Nicole’s journey is anything but linear. From growing up in rural Ohio and falling in love with a single encyclopedia volume, to studying medieval history, working in rare book preservation, and eventually finding the way into taxonomy and ontology, Nico