Karen Perone, photo by Kathy Gray Farthing

Hi, my name is Karen Perone and I'm a FluteBrarian. What exactly does that mean? I'm a librarian who plays the flute.

My undergraduate training is in music education and flute performance. As a professional flutist, I've performed with all types of groups from orchestras, concert bands and wind ensembles, to pit ensembles, chamber ensembles and as a soloist.

I worked my way through college in a music library and after graduating decided to make librarianship my real career. Fast forward a few years and enter this thing called the PC. As the new MLS in the library, I got the "honor" of learning how it worked. At this point, OCLC and RLIN were in their infancy and the Internet wasn't on anyone's radar.

After a brief stint with an early Internet tool called Gopher, Mosaic came on the scene, soon to be followed by Netscape. I installed my first Internet Information Server and tackled this thing called HTML. I coded my first web page using Notepad and launched my library's website in April 1996. Around 2001 I started working with CSS and discovered that websites were a whole lot easier to maintain with the addition of stylesheets.

I haven't looked back.

I've continued to hone my skills through online classes from Element K, eClasses.org, and most recently Sitepoint. I also take continuing education classes in the library world and read lots of books and articles on CSS, HTML, SEO (search engine optimization) and how to market your website. Always wanting to do a better job and learn more, I've also dabbled in javascript and most recently MySQL, Drupal, and PHP.

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