“I am a practitioner at heart, I like helping people figure out the nuts and bolts way to make things happen.”

 Marc Hoffeditz, MLIS ‘24
Northampton, Massachusetts

Introduction to Librarianship

iSchool student Marc Hoffeditz grew up in Virginia. One of his first loves was music and he began playing the flute in the sixth grade. He pursued a Bachelor’s Degree in music composition from Christopher Newport University. The idea of being a librarian was “far away at this point.”

“I had never in a million years thought that I would be a librarian. The world takes us many places.”

Marc graduated in 2012, moved to Boston and started a Master’s degree in music composition from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. He started his first library job as a student circulation assistant in the school’s library, the Albert Alphin Library. He claims, “[the] bug bit me about how great libraries are.” He loved the people he worked with, but he also enjoyed putting his music knowledge to use.

“When you’re in school for music composition, you get a broad overview of many different composers, and I enjoyed being in service to help people find the music they wanted.”

When Marc graduated in 2015, he continued working at the Albert Alphin Library and started a part-time job at the Ginn Library at Tufts University. In 2016, he transitioned to a full-time position at Ginn Library; in 2021, he was promoted to Library Coordinator. 

Access and the E-Book Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Roadmaps

Marc worked at Ginn Library for seven years. While his love of library spaces grew, he maintained it as his “day job” while pursuing music at night. However, things changed for him during the pandemic, when “being part of the [library] profession became really core to my identity.”

“In the pandemic, I became more aware of the challenges that we still face in terms of access. We didn’t have access to our print collections and our community didn’t really understand that. We were able to share some electronic resources, but there were still so many barriers to do so. I never experienced so many issues. It radicalized me to want to fight for overcoming those barriers and make access more plausible no matter what community you are trying to serve.”

Specifically, Marc became interested in developing access in the e-book interlibrary loan (ILL) field, elevating the ability to share digital books between different libraries. He experienced first-hand how difficult this was due to license renegotiations, publishers’ lack of interlibrary loan knowledge and faulty internal infrastructures.

He left Tufts in 2023 and started his current position at the Boston Library Consortium (BLC). However, the access challenges he encountered at Ginn Library inspired him to help form the E-Book Sharing Working Group. The group was part of the BLC’s Strategic Action Plan, and they developed the E-Book ILL Roadmaps.

“People wanted to do e-book interlibrary loan, but they didn’t understand how it worked. My friend Molly (who, along with myself, was the co-chair of the E-Book Sharing Working Group) and I just got tired of hearing the same questions and wanted to do something about it, so we developed the E-Book ILL Roadmaps. It is meant to be a blueprint to figure out the process. It’s going to look different because no two libraries are the same, but hopefully it illuminates the process.”

Marc’s goal is for anyone to be able to take the E-Book ILL Roadmaps back to their library and implement it no matter what library department they work in.

“I am a practitioner at heart, I like helping people figure out the nuts and bolts way to make things happen.”

Community Cooks

While Marc was gaining library experience, he also started helping people by volunteering to cook. His time with Community Cooks, a non-profit organization based in Summerville, Massachusetts, started in 2015. Their mission is to “organize volunteer cooking teams to cook for different human service organizations throughout the greater Boston area,” including, but not limited to, homeless shelters, domestic survivor shelters and youth programs.

“Cooking is definitely one of my love languages. If I care about you, I will cook for you. I like feeding people, I like nourishing people.”

Marc eventually became a team leader and then served as a board member for three years. His time with the group ended earlier this Spring when he moved to Western Massachusetts.

“It’s nice to like to cook and to share that with people who don’t have the means to have access to healthy food or food in general. I applaud a lot of the work being done in Massachusetts at large to help deal with food and hunger issues; having the opportunity to help contribute to that was and is very rewarding.”

SJSU and The Student Research Journal

Marc started considering library science school in the fall of 2021. He began the Masters of Library Information Science program at SJSU in 2022 and graduated in December 2024.

While he enjoyed many program elements, his most rewarding experience was his time as the Managing Editor of the Student Research Journal, “a double-blind peer-reviewed open-access journal.” They “review work from graduate students, specifically research for information and library science.”  It is the only completely student-run journal in California. Marc was amazed “to learn more about what we can do as individuals in this space” and how much the journal became a community outlet for him.

Advice for Students

“There’s an element of asynchronistic education that can be very lonely. To overcome that, I recommend getting involved in student groups and connecting with your peers as much as possible. It’s been so wonderful to help support [the Student Research Journal] over the past year and a half. I encourage anyone to get involved in a group. If you don’t see a group you want, make it happen. Step up to the plate and try to do it yourself. You’re gonna make mistakes, but you’ll learn so much from the process of forging forward and trying new things. That is an experience you can’t get on the job a lot of the time.” 

Life After Graduation

With graduation now behind him, Marc is looking forward to getting back into cooking, exploring Western Massachusetts with his husband and beginning new hobbies, such as bird watching. Marc also enjoys his remote position at the Boston Library Consortium as Resource Sharing Program Manager and does not imagine leaving anytime soon.