With great regret, blended with humor and fond memories, the Maine Library world wished Karl Beiser, first InfoNet CEO,  a well-deserved retirement.  An excellent dinner at the Spectacular Events Center in Bangor was followed by comments full of appropriate accolades from Gary Nichols, State Librarian.  Gary referred to Karl’s authorship of a book about cross country skiing, his days as NMLD consultant, and his work on MaineCat CD ROMs.   He also teased Karl about his expansive answers to any question Gary had every asked him.  Karl’s retort was that any question deserves a comprehensive response! 

Many people wanted to pay tribute to Karl: they included John Clark a former colleague, Kathleen Oliver, Troy Howard Middle School Librarian and family friend; Ellen Wood, Barbara McDade, Joyce Rumery who housed Karl all over Fogler library for years, Melora Norman and myself.  In Karl’s response, he said frankly that he just needs to reboot.  It was obvious that his years working for and with Maine libraries meant a great deal to him.

I managed to locate some highschool friends of Karl who couldn’t tell me ANYTHING for a roast.  I was terribly disappointed even after they did confess that although Karl had been in a number of organizations he had never joined the Library Club or the Library Volunteers groups. To see pictures of Karl’s party, visit Karl’s new Flickr account. Choose “View as slide show” and select one of two sets of pictures “Karl’s retirement Party” and/or Karl as an author”. (These are on the right hand side.)  We had some fun with ”Karl as an Author” here at the State library. Leave some comments!  (Sorry some of the party ones are so dark -poor lighting.)

The Flickr photo sharing account was a gift to Karl from web coordinator Ellen Wood who was determined to keep Karl’s wonderful collaborative skills alive for us all and to force him to remember a new user name and password!

 An era has passed.  Warmest wishes to Karl for many happy years of fulfillment and some rest!