Career
In 1995, West went to Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where she ran a library for the Freedom Forum.
West works as a freelance library consultant, mainly in Orange County, Vermont, focusing on helping libraries with technology. She moderated the group blog
MetaFilter, retiring as Director of Operations in 2014. She is also an active Wikipedian, working particularly on Vermont and library topics. In June 2011 she joined the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board. She has staffed information desks at Burning Man and the 1999 WTO protests, and supported and maintained the Internet Archive's Open Library project.
West briefly signed up as a researcher for Google Answers, writing about her experience for the journal Searcher. She resigned after finding she had probably violated her contract by writing about the service. She believed that "the money factor" skewed the relationship between the researcher and consumer of information, and played a part in the service's later demise.
In 2002, Library Journal named her a "mover and shaker" of the library world. West is considered an "opinion maker" in the profession and presents frequently at conferences. In 2019 she gave the 30th Alice G. Smith Lecture for the School of Information at the University of South Florida in Tampa at the Robert W. Saunders Sr. Public Library, titled "Social justice is a library issue; libraries are a social justice issue".
She addressed challenges faced by people in rural communities on The Takeaway podcast in September 2019, "How Libraries Are Bridging the Digital Divide". She is a self-described anti-capitalist.
From 2016 to 2018, West taught library and information science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Since 2018, she has been a qualifying authority for the Internet Archive. In a 2022 interview on the Slate podcast "Working", she described herself as a "rural tech evangelist" who is committed to helping to alleviate the digital divide. In 2023, West joined the Flickr Foundation as Community Manager for the Flickr Commons.
In 2026 West published the guide, How to Disable or Avoid Intrusive AI.
