Meet Sarah Tribelhorn

Sarah Tribelhorn has been a library faculty member at San Diego State University since mid-summer 2022. Sarah is the Sciences Librarian, with a background in Ichthyology and Fisheries Science. Her areas of interest include enhancing information literacy and scholarship, particularly in the Sciences, while ensuring information availability, accessibility, and dissemination. She has extensive experience in metadata and indexing, editing, and building scientific bibliographic research databases, and writing and editing scientific research.

She is deeply interested in sustainability and scholarship, and developing sustainable processes for academic libraries. Her passion for sustainability began during the work for her MS where she was researching responsible and sustainable solutions for the Phongolo floodplain fisheries in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Water was being released from the Pongolopoort Dam aseasonally during winter, and although water in the floodplain lakes was being replenished, the fish did not spawn and repopulate the floodplain lakes as the water temperature was too low. Not only did this negatively impact the natural resources, such as fishes and other species, but also had negative implications for the impoverished rural communities relying on the fishes as a protein source. She determined the optimal flood release season and duration through her work to restore the ecological balance on the floodplain, and to also improve the socioeconomic status of the community.

Other sustainability efforts have been focused on social equity. As an indexer she worked on ensuring accessibility of information and resources, while ensuring inclusive terminology. As a scientific editor she worked for clients whose first language is not English, enabling them to publish in mainstream English language journals and making their work more accessible. She has an MS from Rhodes University, South Africa, and an MMLIS from the University of Southern California.