When I earned a BA in creative writing from the University of Southern California, it would, of course, follow that I joined the many tech-minded people to work at a start-up in 1998. I had meant to follow in the footsteps of my professor, T.C. Boyle. However, my love of tinkering with new technology won out. A colleague of mine and I were tasked with the job of figuring out and putting together a system to digitize, encode, and stream media for internet content. Here I had my first encounter with metadata when we started to tag the content one file at a time by hand, later writing scripts to make this process easier.

 

I like to meld what I have learned in the Library and Information Science program with my knowledge and past work experience. My courses and internships provided a broad understanding of digital libraries, ranging from basic concepts, digital content, metadata, and information system architecture. In particular, they emphasized the new approaches and techniques of collection building, organization, storage, and access of digital material and the evaluation of digital projects. I acquired a working understanding of UX, accessibility (whether it be user systems, websites, or open access), metadata, linked data, and cataloging.

 

My graduate school mentors said that I am a good "translator," if you will, in project management. My view on project managing is that one leads a project. A leader is not the person who seeks to control the project or the people involved but is, instead, the bridge that helps communicate and connect the wants, needs, and information necessary to make the project happen. I like to help innovate, to help find answers where there aren’t any yet, as well as to figure out what is needed. I "translate" by being the bridge between people and teams, figuring out how to manage what each brings to the table to create this new/necessary thing or an answer to a problem. I would say that I am somewhere in between the tech world and the management/administration world and feel I have enough knowledge about each to help one side understand the other.

 

 

Some things I've participated in

 

The University of Kentucky's Master of Library and Information Science program's Alternative Spring Break:

- Smithsonian Library Field Book Project intern

 

The Association of Research Libraries Career Enhancement Program 

- Research Libraries Fellow at the University of Kentucky's Research Libraries