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Glenda Pearson’s workday starts at 3:15 a.m. tending rescued animals on a six-acre spread -- from wallowing hogs spared the slaughterhouse to ducklings found abandoned in a box along the I-90 corridor. She catches the 6:20 Vashon Island ferry to Seattle and by 7:30 a.m., the witty, warm woman is finally in her ground-level office at Suzzallo Library, where, among files and piles of good-old-fashioned paper documents, there sits a golden medal strung on a purple ribbon that announces her as the 2013 recipient of the .

She pulls it out when a visitor comes calling, slipping it over a Hawaiian shirt printed in palms and parrots and patting the heavy medallion as she recalls the happy day she learned about the award -- honoring her excellence, dedication, and innovation in academic librarianship – and the message from UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce praising her for decades of human rights work at UW libraries. “Maybe I should have gotten this for longevity – I’ve been here so long,” quips the iSchool graduate (MLib ’74). 

Pearson, one of thirteen UW librarians considered for the 2013 award, has served as head of Microform and Newspaper Collections for UW libraries since 1980. Her third title, rarely mentioned but dearly held, is Human Rights Librarian. Her abiding passion for justice – animal and human – is one reason peers have praised her for a “deep generosity of spirit.”

In the late ‘90s, Pearson helped establish a human rights study program on the Seattle, Tacoma, and Bothell campuses and created a human rights subject guide listing articles, literature, databases, and other related documents and links – critical information for academics who would, for the first time, be tackling human rights as a UW minor. The dogged library researcher also built the estimable UW Human Rights Film Directory, covering cinema on such tough topics as anti-Semitism, apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, sweatshops, and human trafficking.

She has served as the go-to person for local amnesty attorneys with clients seeking political asylum in America. One early case involved a man from Ghana who claimed he had barely escaped assassination after a failed coup d’état attempt in his native land. Pearson and the lawyer worked with Foreign Broadcast Information Service and other news sources to verify the story and establish the refugee’s credentials. “It was true,” she says. “He was the only political opponent to get out.”

Pearson, dedicated paper preservationist, is also praised for building one of the largest and most distinctive newspaper collections in North America. Down deep in the sub-basement of Suzzallo, she shows off enormous bound volumes of newspapers that include an estimated 2.5 million newspaper clippings from the Seattle Times, volumes of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dating back to 1877, and an entire collection of the Walla Walla Union. Curiosities uncovered in this subterranean world include 1920s copies of “Watcher on the Tower,” a news report by the now-defunct Washington State Ku Klux Klan chapter promoting “white supremacy” and “Americanism.”

Visitors to this pre-electronic, yellow-papered, august world include authors, film documentarians, and professional scholars who spend long hours poring over information not available digitally, says Pearson, who has an obvious affinity for old-school newsprint. “It is hard to swallow the idea that electronic newspapers are replacing print. Maybe this is the old-generation speaking, but there is still something about picking up the New York Times and reading the real thing.”

Along with her human rights study guide, the widely read librarian has compiled study guides for comparative literature, Hellenic studies, cross-cultural approaches to leadership, and, of course, animal rights.

Pearson and her partner Karen Eliasen -- who also received a master’s from the iSchool (‘96) before going onto a UW master’s in engineering (’98) -- established their non-profit in 1997 on their six-acre property in the center of Vashon Island. Dedicated vegetarians, they care for an estimated 170 animals: donkeys and ducks, llamas and goats, sheep and geese, and whatever other neglected, abandoned, or abused animals need loving attention, including a limping peacock (“Shelton”) and a half-blind bunny (“Bramble”).

Pearson has been a lover of animals and books from childhood. When, after earning her B.A. in comparative literature, she decided to attend what was then the UW School of Librarianship, it was still largely a paper-driven pursuit. She came in with high ambitions. “I liked the idea of trying to organize human knowledge,” says the UW librarian, then quickly laughs. “What a ridiculously oversized idea to have!”

Over her more than 30 years as a UW librarian, she has watched her world explode from primitive programming and reliance on a single database – accessed by one librarian on behalf of one student at a time -- to thousands of databases, available to everyone at the stroke of a finger. It’s a paperless, wireless, instant-info world -- one that Pearson knows well. “We work with the two extremes,” she says. 

Still, she hopes that both her beloved paper documents and the revered brick-and-mortar walls that hold them will survive into the future. “I think the library will always be a physical place. It just has to be,” she says, hefting a heavy newspaper volume back in its place. “It’s great that we have the Internet and you can work independently, but there is something about a physical home for knowledge that I hope remains a part of the human spirit.”