Macalester College

Workplace Overview

Located in the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, Macalester College is a nationally recognized liberal arts college with students from every U.S. state and nearly 100 countries. I spent 13 years at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, working as a college librarian. Research and teaching were at the forefront of my work at Macalester. During several of these years, I collaborated with colleagues on small teams responsible for the design, information architecture, content management, and development of the library and campus websites.

• One large, campus-wide project I worked on for a couple of years at Macalester was a secure web platform that was initially called “Lester.” Aimed at current students, faculty, and staff, this internal resource served as a community information and educational portal. After the site went live for the campus, it was known as “1600grand” (named after the College’s street address).

• An additional project aimed at the library related to the design and development of resource guides for courses & topics. This included a large variety of web pages constructed using a specialized CMS. At the very base level, this CMS allowed individual books, databases, websites, etc. to be included as entities in the system and then these individual resources could be assigned to a variety of other public-facing pages according to a particular course or area of study.