Valerie Horton has been director of Minitex since December 2012. Minitex serves Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota libraries with a large resource-sharing network, databases, continuing education, remote storage, and many other services. Horton is also the co-general editor for Collaborative Librarianship, and wrote Moving Materials: Physical Delivery in Libraries for ALA Publications. Prior to working at Minitex, she was the first director of the Colorado Library Consortium (CliC), a statewide library service organization. Before CliC, Valerie was Director of the Library at Mesa State after ten years at New Mexico State University, where she was Head of Systems, and for a time, library budget director/associate director. During her tenure in New Mexico, Valerie received an ALA International Fellowship and spent a year in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, where she consulted on how to automate the country's public, school, and government libraries. She started her professional career as a systems librarian at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, after graduating from and working in Systems at the University of Hawaii.
Bruce Smith is the Delivery Services Coordinator for the South Central Library System (SCLS). Bruce has been employed by SCLS Delivery Services for 14 years, serving as the Operations Manager and Coordinator since 1996. SCLS is a regional public library system serving 52 member libraries in 7 counties with headquarters in Madison, WI. SCLS Delivery handles approximately 6 million shipped items sent by its member libraries. SCLS also serves as the primary statewide library delivery service for the Wisconsin Libraries' Delivery Network. SCLS provides transport for more than 750,000 ILL items sent by the more than 700 libraries connected to the statewide network. SCLS operates it own delivery service at a centralized sorting facility using a fleet of 24 vehicles that make more than 50,000 annual stops and travel more than 750,000 yearly miles. Bruce has six previous years of experience in the transportation business in the areas of building supply, grocery and expedited package delivery.