Sharon Hogan obit

I was looking in the New York Times on Saturday, and found a story that brought me up short: Sharon Hogan, UIC Librarian, had died at the age of 57.  Here's what the Chicago Sun Times said in her obiturary.

I knew Sharon from my time at CICNet.  CICNet was one of the early "regional networks" that made up what was then known as NSFNet.  CICNet was a creation of the Big 10 schools, who put in a proposal to NSF to  fund a network to tie the schools together.  ("CIC" stands for Committee on Instiutional Cooperation; "Big 10" is the athletic league, and CIC is the umbrella under which these schools cooperate on the academic side.)

Besides just providing a network, we worked hard to find projects to help the universities leverage this newly available connectivity, and one of the first and most enthusastic groups to embrace the Internet were the libraries.  Sharon Hogan was a leader in that community.

More than that, Sharon was just a neat person to be around.  She had no pretense, she was willing to talk, and she was someone who had ideas and the drive to see them through.  And she loved libraries.

Appropos, I wrote this entry using a public PC at a branch of the Dekalb County Public Library.