A pathfinder that presents annotated resources for the scholarly study of the Civil War and collective memory in the contested border state Kentucky. Beginning a research project or literature review is no easy task. A carefully crafted pathfinder can be the perfect springboard for users seeking reliable sources on particular topics or thematic areas. Curating this pathfinder required that I survey the current state of scholarship on the chosen theme, select works that were both representative of major issues in the field and accessible to the researcher demographic I targeted, and package everything together in an easily navigable and attractive website. This project also let me flex my historical research muscles and demonstrate the value of subject knowledge to a career in libraries.

This bibliometric research paper quantified the scholarly literature on metadata analysis and coding published between 2012 and 2022. From command line scripts to open-source applications like OpenRefine, analytical and programmatic tools are essential to efficient and effective bulk metadata management in the 21st century. By identifying journals and authors with large bodies of work on these topics, I helped locate some of the best venues for peer-reviewed scholarship or case studies relevant both to myself and other metadata practitioners. This was also my first foray into quantitative LIS research. It ensured I understood how to conduct quality research, situate it within the existing literature, and communicate it to other professionals.

This qualitative paper chronicled the legitimization and proliferation of pop culture library collections in the U.S. academy. It positioned them as useful aids in the development of American social history--the study of everyday life and people, a pursuit once considered trivial (just like pop culture repositories themselves). In writing this essay, I was reminded of just how vital it is to expose and understand library or archival histories. Researchers rely on collections to reconstruct the past, but the collections - and the institutions that steward them - have histories all their own. Ones that contextualize and inform the acquisition, arrangement, and description of materials in our care. In a metadata context, how can we repair past harms, create culturally sensitive descriptions, and focus our efforts on redressing archival silences if we do not grapple with these legacies?

This video simulates the response to a remote user's reference request for books and articles on misinformation in the modern world.  Initiating, focusing, and then refining a catalog search are essential skills for researchers across all disciplines. Reference interactions are great opportunities to help users locate relevant works while demonstrating these skills. That's precisely what I strove to do here.  This exercise proved to be a fun break from my typical tech services focus. Instead of learning and writing about metadata, I got to show users how they can use a catalog's metadata to their advantage to find the resources they need.

This mission statement and gifts policy were my major contributions to a collection development policy created for the fictional Nimoy Library based on the institutional values and demographics of the Community College of Rhode Island. Crafting a mission statement that fully incorporated those values and expressed them as actionable objectives helped me envision how libraries can actually put their high-level goals into practice. Formulating the gifts policy was a good exercise in researching legal requirements that impact both libraries and donors and then expressing expectations in clear, precise, concrete terms.