Friends Remember Maureen Woods (Looking Back)
Wendy Newman "It is very difficult for me to write about Maureen, a professional colleague who became a close personal friend. Her contributions as a library leader have been many and lasting – locally, where she served local and regional systems in Saskatchewan; provincially, as a leader of ground-breaking provincial planning and implementation in SK, AB, and BC; and nationally, as a leader of PTLDC at a time of national collaborative visioning. Always she showed the same strengths in her approach – identify and listen to the stakeholders, do the research, build community, work collaboratively, understand the priorities of the decision-makers and reflect them back, avoid narrowness and partisanship, and above all, think big. She was the best “translator” of government to libraries and libraries to government that I ever worked with. It is so evident in the BC strategic plan, which takes the premier’s focus on literacy and crafts an action plan to make things happen thr