I work as the Systems Librarian at Penn State Libraries, where I hold the faculty rank of Associate Librarian. My role has spanned traditional and emerging technologies, with growing responsibility for our library’s systems in addition to my longtime work on the library’s catalog, discovery, and bibliographic data. I am currently leading our migration from Sirsi Symphony to ExLibris Alma.

My research agenda has long been driven by concern for the working conditions of colleagues. Sometimes this concern rises to the surface of the research, such as with the Collective Responsibility Forum; other times it directly motivates it, as in interviews with library system maintainers or the essay “Repository Ouroboros”; and even when it is not at the forefront, concern for labor and morale often motivates the underlying question, such as my survey on rates of faculty self-deposit into institutional repositories. Even my creation of EADiva.com, a user-friendly version of the EAD tag library, was driven by a concern that my fellow library school students pass their metadata classes without needing to be technical experts and be able to use EAD at their internships and first jobs.

I am currently writing up my sabbatical research on the longer-term impacts of library systems migration, particularly staff who use these systems daily. I’ve spoken about this as a keynoter at VALA 2024 and Code4Lib 2025. I blog periodically about library topics from reflections on library data and systems to concrete tutorials to thoughts on the field in general.

I’ve been a quilter since I picked up a copy of Quilting for Dummies in 2000 and have begun posting my quilts on this site as well. I’m also the caretaker for a pollinator garden and an anxious pitbull, a game designer/writer, a ham radio operator (KC3AF), a progressive Mennonite, and a GLAM mastodon instance moderator.