2022-23 MiALA Board of Directors

President

Vice President

Darlene Johnson-Bignotti

Brief Biography

I am Library Faculty at Oakland Community College and have spent most of my 19 years at our downtown Royal Oak campus. Besides instruction, reference, and collection management I initiate cross-department collaborations and programs. Before joining OCC I was a branch librarian in the Detroit Public Library system, and the Business Information Librarian at Southfield Public Library for almost a decade.
I have a BS degree in Journalism from GVSU (actually GVSC; I‘m a Willy J alum) and a MSLS from Wayne State University. I am a 2011 graduate of the Galileo Teacher Leadership Academy, a two year cohort focusing on service leadership.
In my Me Time I help my husband grow and harvest food on our urban mini-farm, try new recipes, read (mostly biographies and historical fiction), follow Marvel movies and shows, and dream of dancing and singing with total strangers at a concert someday soon.

Past President

Kate Langan

Brief Biography

I joined WMU Libraries in 2009 as the subject liaison to the humanities department. I hold an M.A. in Library and Information from University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in French Literature from the University of Oklahoma. My primary responsibilities are teaching, learning, and research support for faculty and students in those disciplines. I currently serve as the department lead for WMU Libraries’ Instruction and Outreach department. My research in the recent past has focused on critical librarianship and critical pedagogy, which can be distilled down to how we talk about ideas in an information literacy classroom matters. I also currently serve as vice-chair for the ACRL Project Outcome editorial board.

Secretary

Clayton Hayes

Brief Biography

Clayton Hayes splits his time between Publishing and Learning & Research Support at Wayne State University Libraries, where he has been a full-time librarian since 2015. He serves as the Subject Specialist Librarian to the departments of Mathematics and Urban Studies & Planning in College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to the department of Kinesiology, Health and Sport Studies in the College of Education, to the Irvin D. Reid Honors College, and most of the College of Engineering. He also helps to manage Wayne State's institutional repository and provides support to myriad publishing initiatives in the WSU Library System.
He has been active in a variety of library-related organizations at the local, state, and national levels, including Network Detroit (a local Digital Humanities conference), the Southeastern Michigan League of Libraries (SEMLOL), Mid-Michigan Digital Practitioners (MMDP), LOEX, and the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). He is a lifelong resident of Southeast Michigan and has lived and worked in Detroit since 2006.

Treasurer

Denise Leyton

Brief Biography

Denise Leyton is the Strategic Projects Coordinator in the Environments department at the University of Michigan Library. Taking a user-centered approach, our team collaborates on researching how our buildings, collections, and services are used in order to inform physical design decisions across our library buildings. I use project management, UX research and service design methods to accomplish this work.
I started working in libraries in 2008 as a student in Library Operations. Since then, I have worked in a variety of roles in public services and IT before working in my current position. I graduated with a BA from U-M in 2012 where I focused on sustainable community building and an MSI from U-M in 2015. There, I focused my studies on user experience and archives and records management.

Publicly Funded University Representative

Mary O'Kelly

Brief Biography

I currently serve as the Associate Dean for Education and User Services at Western Michigan University Libraries. Before that I was Head of Instructional Services at Grand Valley State University Libraries. I started working in education 20 years ago at what was then called the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory in Naperville, Illinois, and is now the American Institutes for Research. Prior to moving into education work I held various creative, leadership, and administrative positions primarily in not-for-profit organizations. I have a Bachelor of Arts in communication from the University of Michigan, a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and am working on a Doctor of Philosophy in education and human development with an emphasis on organizational change leadership at Western Michigan University.

Veronica Bielat

Brief Biography

Veronica Bielat is the Student Success Librarian and Subject Specialist Librarian to the Departments of English and Political Science in the Wayne State University Library System. In those roles, she focuses much of her work on creating instructional materials, strategies, and programs for supporting the development of information literacy skills in student and community populations.  She has presented and published numerous times on the topics of course integrated information literacy instruction, integrating technology into information literacy teaching, and design for library instruction. Veronica holds an MLIS (2001) and Education Specialist Certificate in Learning Design and Technology (2017) from Wayne State University.

Private University Representative

Jeremy Barney

Brief Biography

Since July 2016 I have been working as the Metadata and Digital Collections Librarian at Hope College's Van Wylen Library in Holland, Michigan. In this position I provide original cataloging of newly received materials and rare books, help to maintain our library resource management system, perform some collection development, and serve as the manager of our institutional repository and digital collections. Prior to Hope College I was employed at Ball State University (Muncie, IN) for four years as the Multimedia & Digital Cataloging Librarian. I have also worked in other technical services positions at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) and the University of Michigan. I attended the University of Michigan School of Information and The College of Wooster. My graduate school focus was in Archives and Records Management, and I have processed collections at the University of Michigan Special Collections Library and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Outside of my interests in technical services, cataloging, and metadata, I am an avid film watcher and sci-fi fan. Occasionally I’m motivated enough to do some home renovation projects!

Aaron Kilgore

Brief Biography

My name is Aaron Kilgore, and I am a Technical Services Librarian at Hillsdale College. I have been a systems librarian at Hillsdale since June 2019, and in that time I have been involved in several fields on a day-to-day basis; my primary responsibilities are ensuring the functionality of our ILS, selecting all our library's monograph acquisitions, and managing our cataloging staff's activities. Before I became a librarian, I was the head of Hillsdale's Archive Project for two years; in this position, I oversaw the digitization and development of several archival collections that had been acquired by the college over the years prior to its establishment of an official Archives and Special Collections faculty position.

Community College Representative

Krysta Vincent

Brief Biography

I was a reference librarian at Delta College for almost 4 years, before recently transitioning to a new position in Institutional Research as a Data Visualization Specialist. I bring my service-minded experience as a librarian focused on user needs to this position. I am interested in continuing to explore the relationship between academic librarianship, data access and data literacy. I look forward to continuing to represent the often-unique experience of community college librarianship to the MiALA board during my second year.

One remaining CC rep to be appointed

Interest Group Coordinating Council (IGCC)

Representative

Caitlin Benallack

Brief Biography

I am currently the Instruction Librarian at Central Michigan University. I have been a librarian for nearly a decade, and in that time I have had the chance to work at a variety of different kinds of higher education institutions around the Midwest, including UW-Milwaukee (a large, urban, public university), Baker College of Muskegon (a small, private college offering many professional and vocational programs, serving many rural students). While obtaining my masters degrees at Indiana University Bloomington I worked in the IU Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Center, creating accessible versions of texts and other instructional content for students with print disabilities, including many international students. Taken all together, I feel my work experience has exposed me to a wide range of what higher education can be and who higher education students are. This breadth of experiences positions me well to do work in an organization like MiALA, which represents so many different kinds of colleges and universities.

Andrew Lundeen

Brief Biography

Pronouns: he/him/his
I joined the MSU Libraries in 2013, working as a temp/on-call employee before taking a full-time staff position with the Turfgrass Information Center (TIC) in 2015, managing student employees, overseeing our database authority files, and curating our digital content. In 2018, I transitioned into a faculty Librarian role within TIC, before joining MSU Special Collections as a Digital Projects Librarian in 2020. I still maintain a secondary assignment within TIC.
I received my MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a focus in Data Curation and Special Collections Librarianship. I also earned a BA in Religious Studies from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, with minors in Philosophy and Classical Studies.

Two IGCC Representatives to be appointed

Two IGCC Members-at-Large to be appointed