Farewell from Allison Herrera

Posted by NNLM Region 7 on August 15th, 2017 Posted in: Blog

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Hello New England Region,

Thank you for the congratulations. This is my last week at UMass Medical School. Working with the NNLM New England Region office, and previously with the NNLM National Public Health Coordination office, has been absolutely wonderful. I’m going to miss everyone and I’m grateful that I got to know y’all. (I’m from Texas, if you didn’t know!)

In the last year my work with NER has been varied and exciting. We’ve accomplished quite a bit with lots of surprises along the way. My projects involved technology, communications, user experience, website design, virtual reality, and outreach as well. I’m happy to say that our communications and back-end technology initiatives have been going very well and grew incredibly quickly. We launched our new website, our new newsletter, and revamped our social media, such as our Twitter. We started new data analysis that allowed us to create data visualizations that helped inform our decision making processes. We’ve used open communication channels and usability testing to hear more from our members about how we can better serve you as a New England Region and created better experiences from this feedback.

If you aren’t familiar with the NER team, please reach out or get connected with them. Everyone in the team is bright and has exceptional strengths. You still have a window of opportunity to apply to join the team.

I’ll be joining the Harvard Medical School, Countway Library as a User Experience Researcher and Librarian. My new position begins on August 21st. I’ll be working with the community at Harvard Med to shape and build user-centric, forward thinking support for student, faculty, and researcher needs. I’ll be developing and coordinating programs focused on improving and assessing the user experience capabilities of their services and spaces and leading user research projects. I believe that user experience techniques and research will greatly improve libraries that embrace them.

I wish everyone the best and I know that NER will continue to thrive in this next year. I’ll still be living in the New England Region so I’m sure we’ll meet again! Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter @allisonkherrera to stay in touch as well.

Looking forward,

Allison