Digital Dynamo: Michelle Dalmau

Michelle Dalmau always knew she was a “closet librarian.” Although she originally pursued an MIS as “a better match” for her goal of “applying tenets of human-computer interaction and usability in a digital library program,” she soon realized she needed a foundation in the principles of librarianship as well. How else could she truly grasp the world of digital libraries? So Dalmau built her own digital libraries track at Indiana University (IU), graduating with a dual degree.

Dalmau continues to be interested in “the unique and significant ways digital resources can impact pedagogy,” she says. Her goal is to “transform digital libraries into a daily-used resource by researchers, teachers, and students,” she says.

Her roles as digital projects and usability librarian attest to this focus, as does her work with IN Harmony, a collaborative effort to digitize, describe, and make accessible online sheet music from Indiana. Her previous work with the Charles Cushman Photograph Collection at IU brought the user perspective to bear in creating a useful site. As usability consultant with teiPublisher, which allows smaller, resource-limited institutions to publish TEI-encoded texts instantly, she helped make the process as intuitive as possible.

“Michelle is a dynamo,” says Dalmau's former boss Kristine Brancolini, now dean of university libraries at Loyola Marymount University. “She is a perfectionist in the most positive sense of the word. She changed virtually everything we were doing for the better.”