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What I do

Web development

My current daily work is done primarily in WordPress, but also includes customizing Springshare products and Primo (some VE work, for as long as it stays live: one, two; ⭐️new⭐️ NDE work here) with CSS and JavaScript. My most amusing project in the last handful of years has been mass-overwriting a bunch of .cgi files using a Python script.

In the past I’ve enjoyed PHP scripting and customizations, such as modifying RSSlib to include images based on a feed item’s source. Way back, I made significant interface changes to phpScheduleIt and LibStats.

On the enterprise web level, I contributed to Coiled (the code is locked down on GitLab, so I’ve linked the docs) and the Open Science Framework; you can see most of my contributions here. My contributions were primarily Python and JavaScript, and my work also included writing unit tests and performing QA.

WordPress

With all of the CMSs out there, and despite the community’s troubles of late, I still keep coming back to WordPress. It’s such a useful tool! I’ve installed, configured, customized, and maintained numerous WordPress sites, including writing code to customize themes and plugins. I’ve also administered and provided support for several multisite installations with numerous active users.

Data

I enjoy using and teaching both Excel and OpenRefine whenever a dataset is sufficiently small and local that there’s no need to write a program.

But when I get to program, my favorite task is pulling in data (or metadata!) and massaging it into a more useful format. I’ve analyzed data from SQL databases (including Snowflake), REST APIs, and lovingly hand-scraped webpages, generally in Python, but occasionally using R, JavaScript, or PHP. I wrote seven of the metadata harvesters for the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) and contributed to ten others; each one consumes data via an API, generally in XML, and exports normalized JSON. This is a representative example using OAI-PMH. (I also wrote a pretend one that uses a modified version of Faker to output sciencey-sounding titles.)

My graduate thesis proves I used to be pretty solid in MATLAB, but I haven’t been able to afford access to that for well over a decade.

Documentation

I believe the documentation is more important than the code, for most projects.

I also hope that my writing quality here is sufficient to imply that I would write solid documentation. Since most of my recent documentation is locked in Confluence and private repositories, please contact me if you find yourself requiring evidence, and I’ll be happy to send samples.

User Experience

5. User experience is so ingrained that staff consider the usability of all of their work products, including internal communications. Staff are actively considerate, not only toward users but toward their coworkers. 4. User experience is a primary motivator; most staff are comfortable with UX principles. Users are consulted regularly, not just for major decisions, but in an ongoing attempt at improvement. 3. The organization cares about user experience; one or two UX champions bring up users’ needs regularly. Decisions are made based on established usability principles and studies from other organizations, with occasional usability testing. 2. Some effort is made toward improving the user experience. Decisions are based on staff’s gut feelings about patrons’ needs, perhaps combined with anecdotes from service points. 1. Decisions are made based on staff’s preferences, management’s pet projects. User experience [of patrons] is rarely discussed.

I wrote, then led the staff and faculty of an academic library to adopt a plan for user-centric decision making about their web presence; this document has been adopted and adapted for other organizations’ planning, as well.

The Plan for the Web Presence was part of a larger campaign to help my organization become more user-centered in our decision-making. I discussed the campaign in my 2013 LITA Forum talk, “Getting Buy-in on User Centricity,” which was also cited in chapter 5 (“Political and Social Dimensions of Library Code”) of Andromeda Yelton’s Library Technology Report, Coding for Librarians: Learning by Example.

I have performed small-scale (3-5 users) usability tests, using the results from each test to drive important decisions about search interfaces and approaches to website changes.

I have also posited a model for understanding how user-centric an organization is. This model has been used by several organizations (e.g., McGill) to improve their relationships with their users.

Teaching

I taught as an adjunct instructor at the graduate and undergraduate levels for several years, leading to a tenure-track teaching position in Data Analytics (DAT) and Computer Information Technology (CIT) in 2019. In that role, I wrote curriculum for an associate degree and a certificate in Data Analytics, and designed several courses from the ground up. Although I have left that position, my teaching portfolio is still online.

I enjoy making instructional materials such as Jupyter notebooks and written tutorials—an in-person and, later, synchronous remote class accompanied both of those examples. In addition to writing tutorials and running classes, I have also made short, informal instructional videos for colleagues and recorded lessons for students.

More examples:

Leadership

I have made hiring decisions, served on the boards of two non-profits, and been elected to governance positions within several state and national organizations, in addition to working on numerous organizing committees. I co-founded and managed a small women-in-tech organization. I have also served on the management team for a multi-million dollar project, working with engineers to refine time estimates, improving documentation and workflows, and updating spreadsheets and Gantt charts as appropriate. In 2012 the American Library Association named me as an “Emerging Leader,” an honor which included additional leadership training, mentorship, and the opportunity to work with a team of my peers from around the country over a six-month period. I have also been instrumental in the development of a Code of Conduct/Anti-Harassment Policy for four organizations.

I am hoping to grow into a supervisory role one day, because I enjoy mentoring, leading a team, advocating for organizational improvements, and helping other technologists do their best work.

Completed leadership trainings:

Public speaking

I enjoy presenting workshops on various technologies and discussing usability, accessibility, and organizational change. I also like to talk about birds (link goes to an informal 15-minute presentation about owls on YouTube), herbs (link goes to a very rushed 15-minute presentation about making herbal salves on YouTube), and crafting.

In addition to running workshops on any technology I’ve mentioned on this site, I’d love a chance to talk about building accessible LibGuides (or really anything related to accessible digital content), essential oil safety, how to make candles, why you probably don’t want a pet bird, and the intersection of accessibility and gardening. I don’t know if anyone else wants to hear it, but I will also happily rant against generative AI; I have a great bibliography ready.

Contact me if you have something you’d like me to present. I am currently only available to speak remotely, or at events with robust public health protections.

Organizational Social Media

Although I no longer do this work, in the past I have initiated, organized, and managed the Twitter and Facebook accounts for an academic library, a women-in-technology group, and a state library association, as well as some subset of Google+, Google Places, Flickr, LinkedIn, GoodReads, LibraryThing, and Pinterest for each. Two of these organizations required written plans to implement social media, and each of the three had a distinctive voice/personality. In trying to ensure the success of these efforts, I learned the best way to work in each medium, in particular how to game the Facebook algorithm to increase engagement.