Holly Hinman
Holly Hinman likes to say that her library career began at age 8, when she became a library latchkey child because her mother went to work and the town library was in the same building as her mother's office. Her paid career began at age 12, when the town librarian hired her to shelve books and read to the younger kids for fifty cents an hour. Holly continued working in public and school libraries through high school and college, until a fellowship to the Latin American Studies program at the University of Florida put a temporary end to her library career by prohibiting any paid employment. The detour was brief, however, because a librarian at the University of Florida inspired Holly to apply to library schools.
After receiving her M.A. in Latin American History at Florida, Holly packed her bags for the University of Chicago (despite her Massachusetts mother's protestations that "dear, they have Indians and gangsters there"). After receiving an M.A. in Library Science, Holly moved even farther into Indian territory, arriving in California in 1972.
After a brief period at the L.A. County Law Library, Holly joined the staff of the Los Angeles Public Library as a reference librarian in the Business and Economics Department of the Central Library. Two years later, she became the Business and Economics Subject Specialist for SCAN (the Southern California Answering Network). While in SCAN, Holly wrote Beyond Standard and Poor's: A Guide to Non-Print Sources of Corporate Information, conducted numerous workshops on business reference sources, experimented with the early online databases, and had her first exposure to the world of grantwriting.
Grantwriting became a major part of Holly's professional life after she was appointed Director of the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System (MCLS) in March 1978. MCLS sent Holly to training at the Grantsmanship Center in Los Angeles and then put her to work writing grants. Over the next eleven years, Holly wrote dozens of grants, both for the system and for individual member libraries. Holly left MCLS to become the Library Services Manager in Beverly Hills in 1989, and subsequently served as the Library Director in Burbank from 1991 through 1993.
In early 1994, she answered an RFP from the Peninsula Library System to develop and direct a project to introduce the Internet into California Public Libraries. As Director of the Infopeople Project, Holly is responsible for overall Project planning, management, and evaluation. Infopeople has evolved from a project that deployed Internet equipment and connectivity to a project that is the primary training and continuing education program of the California State Library. Holly teaches online and on-ground courses in grantwriting, and is working with Linda Crowe and Peggy Barber on a new edition of their book, "Getting Your Grant".
