Home of Geoffrey Skinner

Death Valley Transport Co. Richard Allsop and Geoffrey Skinner, Proprietors

Photo by David Croker

I am currently Technical Services Coordinator at the University Library, located in the Jean and Charles Schultz Information Center at Sonoma State University in Sonoma County, California. Until 2003, I was the Media & Electronic Resources Support Cataloger at Stanford University. I am an alumni of San Jose State University's School of Library and Information Science, where I received my MLIS in December, 2002. My areas of responsibility at SSU include managing Tech Services; serving as the primary original cataloger and cataloging resource person, government documents; collection development and department liaison for music, film studies, and California cultural studies; and various areas of library governance.

Much of my extracurricular energy focuses on restoring/upgrading a 1910 bungalow near downtown Sebastopol with my family, as well as bike commuting from Sebastopol to SSU. We are neighbors with Patrick Amiot & Brigitte Laurent, junk sculptors extraodinaire, along with many other interesting Sebastopol folk.

I was recently elected Vice President of the Sonoma County Trails Council, with whom I help lead trail maintenance crews, among other roles. I also volunteer with Landpaths for various stewardship projects, including the Taylor Mountain Volunteer Patrol. Finally, I serve on the Sebastopol Library Advisory Board for the Sonoma County Library.

Until moving to Sonoma, I volunteered for many years with a trail builder and president of the Trail Center, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit, where I served many roles, from trail builder to trail planner, and from web manager to president. I was also a long-time member of the Spilt Ink Writers' Group (currently on hiatus), an occasional tenor with the OK Chorale, an a capella reading group; an amateur naturalist with particular interests in botany, geology and insects; and an avid traveler, backpacker, bicyclist, and hiker.

I am the proprietor of Red Gravenstein Arts and its subsidiary, Red Gravenstein Press