About Me

The quick and dirty...

I'm a cataloging supervisor at the University of Southern California. I recently completed my MLIS at San Jose State University in 2011 and aspire to work in an academic library as a subject specialist and reference librarian. My research interests include information literacy, print and digital humanities, emerging trends in scholarly communication, reference and instruction, virtual services, and personal information management.

More than you probably need to know...

I spent the first years of the millennium studying medieval literature and music at Troy University in southern Alabama, filling my days with saxophone recitals, a capella concerts, Old English poetry readings, and French literature. The summer following graduation, I studied Latin at Notre Dame before moving to the University of Virginia to pursue a masters degree in literature. Two years later, I submitted my thesis on metonymy and the Canterbury Tales, packed my Toyota with a few books and a 12-bottle wine refrigerator, and followed the dulcet tones of my GPS to southern California.

In 2007, I began working for the Technical Services department at USC Libraries, creating metadata records for theses and dissertations submitted to the Digital Library, supervising copy cataloging student assistants, performing database management functions, tracking department spending, and managing the statistical analyses of operations. Toward the end of 2009, I became a Cataloging Supervisor for the Grand Library Inventory Project, an ambitious undertaking to catalog all the items in the offsite library (over 2 million!).

In December 2011, I completed the MLIS program at San Jose State University with a specialization in academic libraries.

So what's with "Ink and vellum"?

Getting a URL based on my name would have been ideal, but when both your first and last name are two of the most common names in the United States, that can be tough. In graduate school, I studied medieval literature, so the manuscript, as a physical purveyor of information, has a special place in my heart. Aside from its sentimental appeal, the concomitant pair, ink and vellum, evokes for me the concept of information having both content and form, an aspect which is essential for understanding how to deal with it. Hence, the URL.

[Back to Top]