About

I grew up in Steuben County, New York, and now live in Potsdam, in New York's North Country.

Background

Before libraries, I studied philosophy and politics. Formal logic stuck with me: one counterexample sinks "all A are B," so I am careful about how far a claim reaches. That habit shapes how I write definitions, scope notes, and pretty much everything else.

Cataloging and data science turn out to be close cousins. A catalog is a dataset with very strict rules, and data science supplies the tools to work with information at a scale no card catalog could manage.

Writing

Most of my paid writing is legal content: explaining the system to people who need to use it. I have also published fiction. I like stories with internal tension, characters who stay true to themselves, and endings that land on an image instead of a moral.

Other interests

• Reading Stephen King in publication order. Novels, Bachman books, novellas, and collections, in the order they came out.
• Hockey. I'm a Dallas Stars fan.
• Antique glass. I collect it, and occasionally build regression models about it.
• Genealogy. Family history is a metadata problem with a lot of missing records.