Chat with MLC: Lawrence Smith

Hello, I'm Lawrence Smith, the Collection Management Director at the Mississippi Library Commission. I began working at MLC in 1996. My wife and I moved back to Mississippi after living in Nashville for five years to be closer to her mom. I have a degree in Criminal Justice from Mississippi Delta Community College, but I was a CNA up there. The pay for the same job in Mississippi paid half what I'd made in Tennessee, so I decided to try something new. I took the state exam for a postal clerk (I thought it was a federal exam!) and I did really well. I interviewed at both MLC and the Mississippi Department of Health on the same day. MLC called me back before I even made it back home to Yazoo City, so I accepted.

When I first started at the agency, I pretty much lived in the mail room. I delivered mail, and I got really curious when I'd run across the man who was in charge of patents at the time. He always seemed to be doing something new or having new people visit him in his office. I started asking him all sorts of questions about his job: what he did, how patents worked, all that kind of thing. Growing up, my granddad had what they call a rolling store and I ran a sno-ball machine operation for a while; I liked the intersection of innovation and business that patents offered. After I'd been at MLC for just over a year, my friend moved to the IT department and I applied for his job. I had learned so much about the patents department that I could show the person who interviewed me how to do a patent search. They hired me for the position, and I've been working with patents ever since. In 2008, they added state and federal documents to my job. I had to learn how to catalog and that was a whole process. Now I'm an expert at patents, documents, and cataloging.

One of my favorite things about the job was the yearly training with the US Patent and Trademark Office every spring. I got to travel to Washington, D.C. every spring from 1998 to 2019. I fell in love with the city, the cherry blossoms, and everything patents. They moved the training online during the Covid pandemic and it just hasn't been the same. I'm retiring in May. I'll miss patents, especially all the people I've helped over the years, but it's time and my wife is really happy about it, too. I still have my business in Yazoo City to run, the Lamar Red Barn, and some rental properties to take care of, so I'll stay pretty busy, even without libraries being the focus of my life.

Lawrence Smith
Collection Management Director