Interim Social Sciences Coordinator

In May 2026, I was selected as Interim Social Sciences Coordinator to cover Kathleen Weessies’ six-month sabbatical (May–November 2026). In this leadership role, I supervise nine librarians—seven primary and two secondary reports—while overseeing the operations of the Social Sciences unit. I perform key personnel-related tasks for the team, including helping to set goals and objectives, providing training, responding to professional development and absence requests, and conducting midyear evaluations. I also lead the Social Sciences Unit meetings, arranging appropriate training and topical discussions, and collaborate with the Associate Dean for Faculty Engagement to develop and implement programs that enhance liaison librarians’ skills. Additionally, I lead and coordinate collection development decisions across the social sciences in alignment with MSU Libraries’ general collection policies, working with subject librarians to review and update collection development policy statements and their implementation. I further investigate and test potential acquisitions and provide recommendations to the Collections Strategist and the Collections Strategy Advisory Group regarding cooperative purchases, agreements, and Open Access publishing deals. In this role, I also meet biweekly with the Associate Dean for Faculty Engagement, monthly with the Collections Strategist, and represent the unit at Department Heads meetings and the Collections Strategy Advisory Group.

Collections

Due to librarian retirements in 2022-2023, I added the Military Studies (MIL) fund and expanded the scope of the EUR fund. After discussions with the Collections Strategist, these two funds were deactivated as distinctive, separate codes and all purchasing in these subject areas, along with public policy and political science are now purchased through the Political Science fund (POL). There had previously been too many small funds and there is often subject overlap in these areas, so this change helped reduce the total number of funds.

In February 2021, I started managing the European Union (EUR) fund.

In Fall 2020, I became the liaison to our top-rated School of Packaging and began managing the PKG fund.

In August 2017, I concluded my tertiary assignment in Reference Services and added Political Science to my collection and liaison work.

Resource Mediation

Smithers Packaging Reports

In the spring 2025, our vendor for our main packaging resource, Smithers Packaging Reports contacted me to tell me they were changing our access in the summer. Previously, Smithers made us a special portal where they’d upload the PDFs of the reports for our users to access, but this was not the way any of their other users accessed these reports and our researchers did not have access to any of the tools and additional functionality.

To align with how they handle all other clients, they moved us to an individual account model. While this change significantly enhanced functionality and user experience, the vendor initially lacked processes to accommodate academic-scale usage. Collaborating closely with the Smithers account representative, I designed and implemented a scalable, efficient workflow to manage high-volume account requests—effectively handling simultaneous account requests for large cohorts, such as 100+ students in a single Packaging course requiring access for course assignments. This solution ensures reliable, timely access for our packaging researchers to this critically important resource. I created a libguide explaining how to get access, I worked with Smithers to have them make a short video about these reports, and I set up a Microsoft Form so researchers can easily request access.

LexisNexis Text Assembler

In July 2025, LexisNexis, our vendor for Text Assembler, which allows for large-scale downloading of full-text news sources, changed their pricing model for our renewal in and we were only able to renew for a plan with a capped amount of downloads (1.5 million). The average number of downloads for previous years was 6 million. We were no longer able to continue to allow for unrestricted, users-initiated queries due to the new limitations, so working with Megan Schanz, our Text Assembler interface was changed to only allow users to download 10 results and for anything larger, the researcher would need to fill out a Microsoft Form I made about their query for me to review, work with them to refine their search string, and submit their query to the queue. Unfortunately, even with this new procedure in place, we quickly reached our maximum number of downloads by October. We were luckily able to negotiate with LexisNexis to increase our quota to 6 million through the rest of our contract term.

L2 Voter Data

In July 2024, we acquired this data resource, which contained almost 4TB of raw current and historic data and an online Datamapping interface with a limit of 50 user accounts. Because this data contains sensitive and confidential information about people, the raw data requires mediate access and the limited number of available accounts requires someone to create accounts for the online interface and remove accounts as projects conclude.

I worked with Breezy Silver and Ranti Junus to set up a restricted access point on listings.lib.msu.edu for the raw data files and Ranti initially uploaded the 4TB of data from the hard drive L2 provided to us. I created a policies page for using this data and using Microsoft Forms, I developed a request form and workflow for providing the mediated access to users for the raw files and the Datamapping interface. I spend about an hour a week keeping the raw files updated by downloading the latest data releases from the L2’s FTP server. In addition to mediating access, I also provide support to our researchers for working with this data, both online and the raw files, and have attended L2’s training webniars.

Gallup

In November 2018, the Library purchased access to Gallup Analytics, which includes
microdata that can only be accessed via mediation. As this data covers public opinion and of interest to faculty in Political Science, I volunteered to serve as one of the librarians to provide mediated access to this data to our researchers. Initially, my main responsibility was downloading the new microdata from the FTP site quarterly and adding it to the shared network drive. I also created a libguide for working with Gallup Analytics, providing our researchers with an overview of what data is included and how they can request access to the microdata.

As these are data files (SPSS and STATA), I learned SPSS so that I can work with the data. When the other librarian assisting with Gallup left MSU, I became the sole person responsible for mediating this data. I set up a Microsoft Form in 2023-2024 to provide a standardized way for researchers to request access to this data. Previously, I was just having users email me, but that method required a lot of back and forth between myself and the researcher and there wasn’t an easy way to keep track of requests or statistics about these requests.

After a user contacts me, we have a consultation so that I can learn more about their project and their data needs to ensure Gallup microdata is appropriate for their project. Using SPSS, I then compile the user’s requested variables, generate a codebook, and deliver the data to them in their requested data file format.