Future librarians could learn any number of things from Ed Greenlee’s professional life, but perhaps the most important thing is to follow your passions. “Become a renaissance person,” Greenlee says, and he has certainly followed his own advice. Greenlee currently serves as the Associate Director for Public Services in Biddle Law Library of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Law.

Before beginning at Biddle in 1999, Greenlee worked in a variety of professions and lived in various regions of the United States. After receiving a B.A. in Anthropology and English from State University of New York in 1972, he took a job as a Bibliographic Researcher/Editor at Philadelphia’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Over the next several years at ISI, he went on to serve as Research Assistant, Research Analyst, Research Projects Manager, and as Manager of Research Programming.

During this time, Greenlee was also furthering his academic interests by earning an M.A. in Anthropology (1981), and then a Ph.D. in Anthropology (1989), both from Temple University. Around his fortieth birthday, his academic interests took another turn when he decided he wanted to go to law school. His interest in law stemmed from the year he had spent directly after his undergraduate experience as a Vista volunteer in rural Georgia. So Greenlee attended the Temple University School of Law, and earned his J.D. degree in 1992.

Greenlee practiced law both in the public interest sector, and in the private sector, working in such areas as the AIDS Law Project and the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. But after several years, he came to a realization: “I really didn’t like practicing law, I liked the academic aspect of law.” He went through a process of self-evaluation, asking himself what his strengths and interests were, and decided he would be a natural in an academic library setting.

In 1995, Greenlee earned his M.S. in Library and Information Science from Drexel University. He worked in several part time positions (Archives of the City of Philadelphia, Rutgers University School of Law Library, Biddle Law Library), hoping to impress an employer and be offered a full time job. Soon after, he was offered a full time position at Biddle Law Library, and he has been there ever since.

Ed Greenlee finds that his varied professional and academic background has been an enormous asset to him in his current career as a law librarian. He says of his legal background, “Having a legal education is very helpful in terms of using the materials, responding to patron requests, and that sort of thing.” Because he works closely with the faculty of Penn’s School of Law, his social science background is invaluable. “Training in anthropology makes you very sensitive on one level to how people see the world, that everybody isn’t the same…In terms of this setting, you really see that there are different world views, different values. And as an administrator, [an anthropology background helps you] to be sensitive to the world views and values of different people who work in this environment. You understand how groups operate.”

As a student at IST, Greenlee was able to integrate past professional and academic experiences with the new library and information tools he was learning. At ISI, he had worked in the area of bibliometrics and learned of the research done in that field by Dr. Katherine McCain, IST faculty member; then, he found himself taking a class with Dr. McCain. He became fascinated by cataloging, so he took both of the cataloging courses offered by Drexel. He did an independent study with Dr. Howard White on the Internet and censorship, when the Internet was just being formed.

Ed Greenlee’s experiences are more than varied, interesting, and accomplished—they are a perfect example of how he encourages students to find their own places in the professional world. He says, “I think one of the keys is to draw on your strengths. What do you really like, what is your background? Folks will be interested in different skills that you have that could become very beneficial to your career. Become a kind of renaissance person. It helps the institution you’re working in, and makes your job very rewarding.