Goodbye and Many Adventures!

This month we say goodbye and wish “many adventures” to Adult Services Librarian Dona Mastin. Dona worked for Greene County Public Library for over 25 years, with 22 of those years at Winters-Bellbrook Community Library.

Dona’s library career includes a college library in Missouri, a school library in California, a public library in Virginia, and the Air Force Institute of Technology library at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In Greene County, she worked at the Beavercreek and Xenia Community Libraries before settling in at Winters-Bellbrook.

In 1997, as the Bellbrook area was growing in population, former Branch Head Judy Brucken saw a need for this library to expand its reference book collection and hire a reference librarian to be available to help patrons use the library and do research. Dona has seen the change from catalog cards to the online catalog, and access to information evolve from microfilm, to CD-ROMs, to current digital content. She remembers when the library carried music on LP albums, then cassettes, then CDs, and now downloadable audio.

Although librarians’ tasks have changed over the years, Dona has continued to carry out the library’s mission of providing excellent patron service. Her special projects have included creating our library’s “Classics” book collection and expanding our holdings of local history information. Dona added to the holdings of Bellbrook biographies and histories, and established a liaison with Bellbrook High School to update our library’s collection of local high school yearbooks. She has been the facilitator of the long-running Winters Book Discussion Group and has helped provide many interesting programs for our patrons. She has been a friendly and helpful face of the library to our community and she will be missed!

Dona retired on March 1 and hopes to do more traveling, community gardening, spending time with her grandchildren, and listening to audiobooks. We wish her the very best!