Jane Keefer, who is now retired from her third fulltime career as a librarian was most recently employed as a reference librarian at Portland Community College and Lewis & Clark College in the Portland area. She also held science and chemistry librarian positions at West Chester Unversity, Johns Hopkins University and Eastern Michigan University. and continues her library work with occasional on-call reference desk work at Portland Community College. Her first career was as a research scientist in Chemical Physics and she has a PhD in Chemistry.
Her second career, spanning more than 10 years in the Pacific Northwest, involved teaching, arranging, and performing folk music on a variety of instruments, including banjo, guitar, fiddle, and dulcimer. Now living and retired in the SE Portland, Oregon area, she still teaches some private lessons and classes thru Artichoke Community Music as well as providing summer folk music classes thru the Portland Parks & Recreation Community Music Center. Additionally she is a member of the band, General Strike, a Portland group the performs music from the labor union traditions for a wide variety of occasions. She was the President of the Portland Folklore Society in 2005 and, working as a volunteer, she has assisted the Oregon Folklife Program in organizing and documenting their field recording archives. In October 2002, she gave a brief presentation as part of a panel on folk music indexing at the American Folklore Society Meeting in Rochester, NY.
Her most recent project involved the publication of 40 fiddle tune arrangements for fiddle, flatpick guitar, clawhammer banjo, and mandolin, in collaboration with Dick Weissman and Terry Prohaska. The tunes represent pieces she learned and taught in the 70's and 80's on the west coast from a variety of sources including several older fiddlers. These 4 books are now available from Mel Bay and are also available through Amazon.com
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