We’re excited to kick off our first “Three Questions” post of 2021 with Katherine Renzelmann, Content Management Assistant.

Katherine Renzelmann, Content Management Assistant

What areas can you help MSK users with?

As part of the content management team, I help oversee our print and electronic collections. This includes analyzing our collection to decide which materials to add or deaccession, as well as checking in and cataloging new resources within our database. I’m available to help MSK users with any issues or questions they may have regarding access to the Library’s print and electronic resources. 

What projects have you been working on recently?

Now that the Library is open again, I’ve been checking in our formidable backlog of print journals and getting them on the shelves for our patrons to utilize. I’ve also been working on fixing standardization issues in our print volume enumeration as it appears in OneSearch. Differences in labeling formats in some journals are causing volumes to be listed out of order, making it more difficult for our users to find what they’re looking for.  

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

I’ve wanted to travel to Iceland ever since I was a child. I feel like there’s so much natural beauty there—glaciers, volcanos, hot springs, the aurora borealis—Iceland has everything! As someone with a background in horseback riding, I’d also really enjoy doing a multi-day horseback riding tour across Iceland’s peninsula. Icelandic horses are incredibly unique and I’d love to experience riding one.   

For our next Three Questions interview, we spoke with Jeanine McSweeney, Associate Librarian, Scholarly Communications.

What areas can you help MSK users with?

I manage Synapse, the authoritative database of MSK authors and their publications. The Synapse Team tracks and adds new publications by MSK authors and organizes them under author profiles. Within Synapse you will find links to the full-text of a work, Altmetrics and citation counts, and integration with ORCID iD. I work with various departments at MSK to create customized groups of authors, helping them to track, showcase, and report on the publication output of their departments. Basically, if you have questions about managing your own or your department’s publications, or finding ways to demonstrate your research impact, I am here to help.

What projects have you been working on recently?

My fish tank, a recent trip to Watkins Glen, and me.

Over the summer we released our annual Synapse Publications Report, which highlights the publication output of our MSK researchers. Right now my team is working on restructuring the Synapse “journal articles” category so that our users can better pull out just the peer-reviewed research articles for their grant and reporting needs. Currently Synapse includes non-peer reviewed formats in the “journal article” category like editorials, letters, reviews etc., and we have learned from our users that breaking this down would be more helpful. We aim to have our workflow in place by the end of the year so that moving forward, pulling out needed data from Synapse is even more convenient for our users.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

When able, my first trip will be to Germany so I can visit with my partner’s family that I have not seen now in over a year. Aside from that, I read a lot of Agatha Christie when I was young and have romanticized notions of the English countryside that I would love to spend time exploring. So one of my bucket list trips is to spend a few weeks touring around England and the rest of the UK.