The time has come for our second Employee Spotlight! Last month we shared our interview with Adam, our Development Manager for Europe. You can catch up on that here.
Next up is Yawei Li, our Library Services Consultant for Smaller Libraries & Corporates. Yawei has worked at Lean Library for just over a year, and in that time has made a big impact with her perseverance and enthusiasm for library services.
Read on to find out more about Yawei, her love of getting outside, playing LEGO, Christopher Nolan and helping smaller libraries!
Can you tell us a bit about what you do at Lean Library?
We have always focused mainly on academic institutes, but now, to align with our new updated values and missions, we have begun to extend our support to global smaller academic institutes and non-academic (corporate) libraries. This is where my role comes in! My responsibility is to help these institutes by recognising their needs, providing prompt Lean Library solutions, giving demos, providing support, giving training sessions to their employees and such to make their working life and transition to Lean Library much easier.
What is your favourite thing about working at Lean Library?
We’re such a fast-growing team with the most supportive and collaborative team members. I love that everyday looks exciting and fun with new projects going on! We just successfully launched our rebranded website with our new mission and values. I am grateful that we are pioneering a new way of thinking to help the library serve as many patrons as possible.
What is your favourite Lean Library value and how have you seen it put into action?
That’d definitely be ‘Collaborative.’ Every success comes from collaboration – with every member of the team, with supportive library service providers, with amazing librarians and patrons through proactive engagements. Within a few months, we have already accomplished the rebranded website plan, scite integration, Springshare integration, and Reprints Desk integration by collaborating with each other closely.
What’s the best day you’ve ever had at work? Is there a particular project or milestone you are proud of?
I wouldn’t try to pick a ‘best’ day yet but the day I hosted the Global Smaller Institutes Webinar was definitely a remarkable Lean Library experience for me. It makes my work much more meaningful when I am helping to support smaller libraries in every way I can!
What three things are always on your desk?
A cup of tea, hot water bag and my earphones.
You can choose up to four people (dead or alive) to join your dinner party. Who are they?
My grandmother, Immanuel Kant, Richard Feynman and Christopher Nolan.
You need to put your head down and get some work done. Do you have a go-to song?
Oh definitely… periodically I find a catchy song and play it over and over again, for these recent couple of weeks, it’s Whatever It Takes from Imagine Dragons.
It’s your day off. What do you have planned?
I’ll be outside! Going to a theme park, a musical festival, a concert, a football match, or a picnic in a national park, etc! I am always happy when going to events with my friends.
Alternatively I also love playing board games (this weekend we played Mahjong), cooking an exquisite meal, watching a movie, and playing LEGO indoors when the weather could be better.
If you didn’t work at Lean Library or as a Library Services Consultant, what would you want to do?
So many things! I hope one day to have a peaceful home in nature, and then to adopt as many abandoned animals as possible and try to take good care of them for their rest of lives. I would also love to form a band with some friends (I play the guitar and the drums!) If lucky enough, I wish to travel to different places to get to know about all the different cultures and people.
Look out for the next post in the Get to Know Lean Library series, coming next month.