When you grow up in a home where people know the power of education, the environment forges how you view the world.
“My mom was a first-grade teacher,” says Paula Settoon, TCC Dean of Libraries and Knowledge Management. “She taught through desegregation. She taught people who had never seen books. She was the first in her family to go to college, and she believed in the power of education.”
Books provided the backdrop and setting to her life. Books, rather than television, served as entertainment in their home. During the summer, the family awaited the arrival of the book mobile, and every Saturday, her mother took them to the library.
Libraries became a fixture and a road to be taken.
An aptitude test pointed Settoon toward two career paths: English and Librarian. She chose English, finished that degree, then contemplated her mother’s expectations for her career.
“Parents always have goals for their children based on what they didn’t achieve,” says Settoon. “She wanted me to get a master’s degree. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I ended up talking to our town librarian who said, ‘Why don’t you go to library school? You can go to conferences where you can get free books.
“I’ve worked in libraries pretty much ever since.”
She’s worked in public libraries and done reference work, archival work, and been a youth librarian. It formed the prism through which she views the societal role of librarians and informed her management of TCC’s libraries.
“We’re jacks-of-all trades. We know a little bit about a lot of stuff, and we can find anything about anything. I love having a question and then finding an answer to it. I’ve taken that to the work we do at the College. I’ve encouraged involvement at the College that isn’t traditional. We do a lot of research projects, and we work with everyone from the Board of Regents to faculty and students.”
That also reflects the library-adjacent work she does at TCC, such as chairing the Higher Learning Commission committee, which is responsible for keeping the College’s accreditation in place. In that role, she’s become a peer-reviewer for other higher education institutions and spearheaded the effort to get TCC’s first-ever bachelor’s degree accredited.
She also guided the effort that led to a $3.7 million grant based on work with Complete College America. It is a Postsecondary Student Success Grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education from the U.S. Department of Education.
“We looked at retaining students and helping them complete their degrees by completing college success courses connected to a field of study,” says Paula. “Things are going well. We’re seeing progress.”
Her experience with the HLC and higher education made her the perfect liasion for TCC to the Pawnee Nation in establishing its own college.
“Education, community, libraries … it all goes together,” says Settoon. “We’re here to help people build better lives. It’s all about a successful future. Part of our work is to make everyone feel welcome, and to make everyone feel welcome, we have to have things for everyone. We can’t let our personal beliefs overshadow the collection. The collection has to be neutral and balanced.”
Her view of the role of librarians shapes how she leads her department at TCC, and how she looks toward the future.
“In community colleges, with AI, we’re working with students to understand what’s real and what’s not. It’s just another type of information literacy. What are good sources? What are source biases? What are sources without biases? How can you tell if it’s human or AI generated? There’s going to be a need for that for a really long time,” says Settoon.
“Librarians have been around for thousands of years, and they’ll be around for thousands more. We continue to reinvent ourselves.”