About
I work as an associate professor of information science at the University of Kentucky, where I teach in the library science and the information, communication, and technology programs.
My research interests broadly include scholarly communication, information retrieval, and academic libraries. A bit more specifically, some of the topics I have explored include bias in peer review, health information retrieval, megajournals, reference librarianship, qualitative methodology, fake news, tacit knowledge, open science, history of library automation, and electronic resources.
I use quantitative and qualitative methodologies but have also published some historical and philosophical work. More information about my research is available on my research topics page and my research workflow page, on my CV and at the following sites:
Bio
I grew up in San Antonio, Texas and left for Monmouth College, Monmouth, Illinois upon the advice and encouragement of a high school English teacher. Monmouth was a great experience with wonderful professors.
Some life happened after college, and instead of attending graduate school, I started to work in restaurants full time. I had cooked in some restaurants in high school and in college, and I felt comfortable in that space. I also waited tables and tended bar, and I ended up working in about 21 restaurants overall. I worked in fast food, a diner, a truck stop, a dive bar, various casual places, and one fine dining Italian restaurant in the Seattle area. I moved around a lot---something like seven states and well over twice as many cities/towns.
I applied to graduate school and started in 2007. While in school, I worked as a reference librarian and later a cataloger at a small liberal arts college. I intended to work as a librarian but was encouraged to apply to the PhD program. I think I would have enjoyed librarianship as a long-term career, but I am glad that I did the PhD.
I've been at the University of Kentucky since 2013. It can be a rewarding and also a frustrating profession, but I feel privileged and fortunate to do it. I feel more fortunate for some other things, like my family, which I never imagined I'd have and which started later in life for me.
Thanks for visiting.
Site Info
Automating this Website
I wrote a handful of weird scripts to automate site publishing and deploying to The Text, which is a single page of mostly short posts on a range of topics: Site Automation w/ Scripts.
Privacy
I do not have any analytics software installed on this site. This site uses only HTML and CSS and is coded in /usr/bin/vim, although some posts in The Text are written in /usr/bin/ed.
All opinions, viewpoints, etc expressed on this site are my own or otherwise attributed.