Maintains a sense of humor and objectivity.

My subject areas are rather weighty and can be intimidating to others.  I try to create a level of accessibility for the information that I present to others, and I often try to accomplish this through humorous and light-hearted means.  My presentation at the Michigan Library Association Annual Conference on the role of academic libraries and archives for research data management is an example of this. My part was to explain what research data is, why research data matters, and problems faced by researchers when it comes to working with their research data.  Some consider this topic to be boring, so in order to increase interest, I relied heavily on filling my slides with lolcats (and one loldog), rather than presenting a lot of overwhelming text on a slide.

Formulates realistic yet challenging personal goals and objectives.
Monitors and accomplishes personal goals and objectives.

Click here to access my annotated goals and objectives.

Demonstrates willingness to take risks.

The government documents community is conservative and hesitant to rely on electronic versions in place of print. This has been intensified by the government shutdown in October 2013, which resulted in the shutdown of many government websites, causing the electronic publications they contained to become inaccessible.  Despite this conservative atmosphere, I am pursuing projects that help shrink our federal documents collection in order to create more patron space.

Working with our regional library, the University of Minnesota (UMN), I have sent 3149 volumes that we owned but UMN did not to be stored at UMN.

I have sent 5344 volumes of the Serial Set to Remote Storage. Due to needing more space and lack of use, I later disposed of the Serial Set.

I have sent 2224 volumes of the Congressional Record and its predecessors to Surplus for disposal. I did take a risk and decide to keep 164 volumes of Congressional Record indexes because I think they may have reference value that the electronic version does not easily allow.

At this time, I have removed 10,717 volumes from the Main Library.

I sent about 4000 government documents for destructive digitization.

I sent a majority of our Congressional Hearings to Surplus for disposal.\

I heavily weeded the documents collection housed at Remote Storage during Summer 2016. Since we were revamping the Remote Storage space that housed this collection, it was necessary to review what items were housed out there, dispose of the unneeded items, send needed items to our regional library, and integrate the remaining government documents into the Main Library collection on 3 West.

For all of these projects, our library will rely on access to electronic versions of these publications, through HathiTrust, Google Books, and the Government Publishing Office or through vended products, such as Proquest Congressional. In the event that electronic copies do not adequately meet the need of our users, our users can request to borrow the print through InterLibrary Loan from our regional library or from other libraries.  This project is risky because of how many items I am permanently removing from our collection.  If our users decide that the electronic format is not adequate, what I’ve done cannot be undone because many of these items will have been destroyed in one way or another.

As Assistant Copyright Librarian, the decisions that I made regarding interpreting a copyright use as being a fair use was always risky, especially in an online environment which increases the chance that the use could be discovered. Every decision in favor of fair use that I made could have potentially ended in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Because of this, all responses to copyright queries were provided in writing via email, just in case it would be required as evidence of good faith. It’s one thing to take risks, but there’s no reason to make unnecessarily risky decisions and not protect yourself and the institution.

Manages time and resources.

I manage both the DOCMO and DOCSR funds, purchasing items that fit within the scope of the collection development plans for both U.S. and international documents and also finding items that will enhance and support our researchers.

Having a primary (gov docs), secondary (cataloging), and tertiary (reference) plus managing my committee responsibilities and Criterion II work can be rather difficult. While all librarians at MSU are in a very similar situation to myself, the ability to properly manage one’s limited time is critical to success and meeting deadlines and expectations. This can be tricky when special projects are occurring, such as shifting or weeding one’s collection area. Being able to prioritize tasks and responsibilities is something that I work very hard to do. While I am still new to cataloging and my stats are not as high as I would like, I know that as my shifting and weeding projects wrap up I will have more time to devote to my secondary assignment. This is something that I talk about with my supervisors and they are aware and understanding of how I must prioritize my workload.

I supervise two student employees who work in government documents shelving and I make their schedules, while also ensuring that I am not exceeding my student employee budget. I also estimate the student budget for my unit for the upcoming year.

In the spring semester, my instruction load for James Madison College (JMC) was heavy.       Since almost all (13 out of 15 sections in 2014) of the MC 112 instructors want to bring their classes in for at least one library instruction session, I have to make sure that I am scheduling the classes within an acceptable timeframe for the instructors, but without overloading my own schedule. Each MC 112 class takes at least four hours of prep time, so I need to balance prepping and teaching, along with my other duties. In January and February, I do ask the Head of Reference to cut back on my number of reference shifts and to give me weekend or night shifts so that way my days are free for scheduling these instruction classes.