About Me...

I'm a librarian and archivist with three decades of experience in special libraries, cancer centers, college and university libraries and archives, and pharmaceutical companies.

My career as a librarian has not been a typical one.

Interwoven with paths of teaching, arts education, poetry, fiction writing, journalism, and other pursuits, my path has been defined by my purpose: employing metadata to help people find the answers to their questions. Whether it's in library instruction, archives, cataloging, indexing, or at the reference desk, my goal is to help you find what you need, and make sure you can find it again.

How can my expertise help you with your goals?

Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library

As Director of Content and Services at the University of California. San Francisco Library and Center for Knowledge Management, I led the team which created the world's largest digital library at the time, the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library, which served as the model for the Industry Documents Library.

The original seven sets of documents from seven tobacco companies were obtained from the National Association of Attorneys General on magnetic tape, mounted on the earliest terabyte servers, and run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to create searchable text. I cross-walked seven metadata schema into one federated search interface. This serves as the model for the current sets of formerly documents from tobacco, opioid, drug, fossil fuel and food industries.

More than seven million visitors have accessed the Truth Library since they were made publicly available by the UCSF Library in 2002, and the collections have been instrumental in furthering tobacco control research and education for over two decades.

My one-woman business, Personal Research Services, assisted clients in journalism, education, medicine, and public health to retrieve and build their own collections of tobacco documents to support work exposing the lies and tactices of the industry. Clients included Harvard University, David Lewis Consulting, Northeastern University Tobacco Products Liability Project, and Health Canada.

Reference and Library Instruction

I held roles as Reference Librarian at:

SUNY at Buffalo (Lockwood Library)
Buffalo State University (E.H. Butler Library)
Canisius College (Andrew L. Bowhuis Library)
D'Youville University (Montante Family Library) where I also served as Head of Library Instruction

Cataloging and Indexing

I began my career as a document indexer at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, now Roswell Park Cancer Center, reading over 5,000 tobacco company secret documents which revealed the industry strategy to market cigarettes to kids. The indexed and abstracted Marketing To Youth collection was integrated into the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents collection in 2002.

As Head of Cataloging at D'Youville College, now D'Youville University, I added over 20,000 titles to the library catalog.

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