Miles Holst, Purveyor of the Planned and Impromptu

This is the first of a series of articles we’ll run over the next few months about some of our best and brightest, the student employees who help us keep the NCSU Libraries cooking. It’s not quite the Hall of Fame, an Oscar or the Pulitzer—but we hope it shows our appreciation for the students who do such a great job for us.

The Libraries’ mission is to be the competitive advantage for NC State—to provide the best learning and collaborative spaces. That can’t be done without the students who work here. They may not yet have all the training and experience of our professional staff, but nobody, nobody, understands what students need better than one of their own. And they come to us with a level of passion and desire to learn and help that are exactly the values we hope you see each time you come into the Libraries. We’d like to celebrate the way this wonderful bunch of people makes the Libraries a better place to work and study.

Miles Holst was singled out this summer by the Independent —the Raleigh area’s most popular weekly newspaper—for an Indie Arts award as one of the movers and shakers of the local arts scene. Not bad for someone who is still an undergrad. He is, the Independent points out, “a purveyor of planned and impromptu social gatherings . . . a DJ, designer, arts curator, inventor and, sometimes, pied piper.” The energy with which he spreads “design” to any audience he can gather makes him stand out from all the arts aficionados in the Triangle. That energy is exactly what makes him so valuable around the Design Library .

Miles Holst has brought his enthusiasm about all things design to his position as student worker at the Design Library for the past three years. He has worked at everything from shelving books and filing slides, to digitizing images for the Design Library Image Database, to providing reference and circulation service to students and faculty in the evenings and on weekends. Miles brings great ability, dedication, talent, and a tremendous interest in the Design Library’s collection and services to everything he does.

But where he really excels is in providing assistance at the desk to students and faculty. His outgoing nature and enthusiasm for all aspects of design translate into a desire to spread design inspiration and knowledge to everyone. According to Karen DeWitt, Director of the Design Library, “whether someone comes in the door here just routinely looking for a book or in a dire need of some arcane resource, I know I can count on Miles to make what needs to happen happen. And the user will leave with an injection of enthusiasm. More students and faculty than any of us can count have been the beneficiaries of his boundless energy and ability.”

Check out the article about Miles in the Independent . All of us here in the Libraries are proud to be his colleague.