Camp Leaders

Tech Camp Organising Committee – meet the people behind VALA Tech Camp 2021

Melissa Parent is a Senior Librarian in the Description (Published) team at State Library Victoria. At work, she enjoys wrestling unruly data into efficient workflows and has a keen interest in automating absolutely anything that can be automated. She’s not a good coder yet but is working on that. When not at work Melissa is immersed in RDA as a member of the RDA Steering Committee and is helping to wrap up the 3R Project that will bring descriptive standards into the 21st century. She’s happy to talk about tech, data, and data standards at all times.

Matthias Liffers is a librarian with a strong technological bent. He prefers to not send a human to do a machine’s work and believes strongly in automating as much as possible. He works at the Australian Research Data Commons on software skills projects for researchers and research support staff. Outside of work, he changes hobbies every few months and occasionally tweets about it at @mpfl, or posts mediocre photos as mpflx on Instagram.

Katie has extensive experience in corporate administration, content management, and libraries. She is the Principal Librarian Collections at the Supreme Court Library Queensland, overseeing the curation, access, and discovery of the research, legal heritage, and CaseLaw collections. Katie specialises in digital collections and library systems and holds a Bachelor of Information Technology (Information Services), and postgraduate qualifications in management and business. Katie has previously held volunteer committee positions including VALA President in 2019, and was the Co-Chair for the VALA2018 and VALA2020 conferences. Katie is passionate about increasing collection discovery via crowdsourcing projects, and improving standards and library expectations regarding library management systems.

Heather is the Leeper Librarian at Trinity College, University of Melbourne. This involves managing a library which serves a diverse population of international, theological and undergraduate students, and wrangling significant historical collections as well as up-to-date academic resources, but very little leaping about. Previously she has worked mostly in P-12 education in both government and private schools. Heather believes in efficiency and organisation and is passionate about using technology to achieve her goals. Her motto is “Learn, Do, Teach” – she loves to learn by playing and isn’t afraid of seeing what will happen if she just pushes that button.

Amy recently graduated with a Masters of Information Management and is so excited by the future of technology in GLAM spaces that she has started her second undergraduate in Computer Science. She has a background in languages and customer service, cumulative experiences that have left her with the reading age of a French teenager and the wonderful ability to read young adult science fiction novels in another language. On a fundamental level she enjoys making things and using her hands, which usually manifests itself on a daily basis through knitting and cooking. She is currently occupied as a collections volunteer at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria all the while working to improve her coding by getting better acquainted with Java and making wonderfully superfluous small programs.