Staff Bulletin: Meet: Gail Ragan

Hello Everyone! Meet Gail Ragan, Hale Library’s newest programmer!

Gail originally hails from St. Louis, which explains her education stint at University of Missouri at Columbia where she studied Math, with a minor in Computer Science. From Columbia and St. Louis, Gail and her family made their way to New York, and then later to the littler apple here in Manhattan. Once in Manhattan Gail studied Computer Science here at K-State pursuing her love for databases, networks and systems programming.

In Gail’s own words this is what her job as a programmer entails of currently:

I am working on acquiring the specific technological knowledge that will allow me to do the kind of work that the library systems require. One of these areas of knowledge is the Perl programming language. Another technology is JQuery, which is a newer, more practical, way to do JavaScript. Also, I'm working on XML, XSLT, XQuery, and XPath, which are all standards that allow us to move hierarchical data around and display it. The goal in using all these ways of interacting with data is that we will get together with users and put data together in useful ways. Hopefully, we will allow people to gain insights that they never could have imagined before.

Gail has three children, and her fondest memories of raising them were taking them for walks around town, and attempting to read stories to them while they sat on her lap, but you know that kids are squirmy! As her kids got older, her family began taking vacations that focused around hiking and physical activity (physical therapy and nutrition is another passion of Gail’s). Her favorite vacation was to Banff, Canada which involved a well-known hike from Lake Louise to the Lake Agnes Tea House. Gail told me that the lake is glacier fed, giving it distinctive coloring, and the quaint teahouse tucked away in a valley of the mountain made for a very memorable trip.

Time for some Truths & Lies! Guess which ones are truths and lies, and let us know your selections in the comments section, and don’t forget to swing by Gail’s office to meet her if you haven’t already!

1. Gail has worked for K-State three separate times, in three different buildings.

2. She worked in Oslo for the Bioforsk.

3. Combined, all her kids have lived in eleven different cities since they started school & work.

4. Gail has been a student at K-State three different times.

5. When Gail first saw the Great Room, she was awestruck.

6. She has been to four different mountaintops in the Rocky Mountain National Park.