2023 Presenters

Preethi Fernando-Keynote Speaker

Preethi Fernando is the author of twelve books and is a speaker. She serves as a consultant for companies, associations, and businesses. She enjoys hiking, meeting people, biking, and reading. Preethi has won the Stephen King Haven Foundation Award, which is given to one author each year. Preethi’s life motto is to rise every time you fall. Preethi says “It is not what happens to us, but what we do with what happens to us, that determines how our lives turn out in the end.”

Danielle Bromelia

Danielle Bromelia is the product manager for WorldCat.org. She has worn many hats at OCLC working in customer support, training, with WorldCat Discovery, and now as the product manager of WorldCat.org. At home she enjoys reading, playing board games with family, and walks through the local metroparks.

Christopher C. Brown

Christopher C. Brown works at the University of Denver Main Library. As Reference Librarian and Coordinator for Government Documents he assists undergraduate and graduate students in academic research. Among his publications are Harnessing the Power of Google: What Every Researcher Should Know (Libraries Unlimited, 2017), and Librarian’s Guide to Online Searching: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction, 5th edition (with Suzanne S. Bell, Libraries Unlimited, 2018).

Tony Melvyn

Educated by Jesuits, Tony has always sought out the truth. Despite the fact that Tony barely passed the one required math course at Saint Louis University, he finds himself crunching numbers and immersing himself in statistics. A native Texan, Tony received his BA in History at Saint Louis University. It was at SLU that Tony landed his first job in the library world as an acquisitions searcher. He then attended Creighton University and continued his library career in Interlibrary Loan and Reference at the Bellevue Public library in Bellevue, Nebraska. In 1986, he accepted a position at OCLC as an ILL support specialist. His career at OCLC has always been in support of ILL.

Alena Miller

Alena Miller is a product manager on OCLC’s Resource Sharing team who enjoys working with library staff and patrons to understand obstacles, analyze potential solutions, and implement improvements to the overall user experience. She enjoys spending time outdoors and traveling for both fun and education.

Sara Juel

Sara Juel is the Access Services Program Manager for both ILLiad and Ares. Her role is to lead the product teams for ILLiad and Ares in creating the roadmap, prioritizing development work, and communicating product information & news to customers and support staff on both the Atlas and OCLC teams.

Kieran Hixon

Kieran is the Rural & Small Library Consultant at the Colorado State Library. He is an engaging and enthusiastic public speaker focusing on customer service, strategic planning, and policy. Based in Wetmore, Colorado, he has served as President of the Association for Rural & Small Libraries and Project Director of the Outstanding in Their Field Leadership Institute. He has a passion for helping strengthen what you do to meet the needs of your community.

Christine Krieger

Currently working as the Professional Development Coordinator for the Colorado State Library, Christine Kreger is passionate about providing the tools, training, and support library staff at all levels need to provide amazing services to their communities.

Amy Hitchner

Amy Hitchner is the Metadata and Integration Services Senior Consultant for the Colorado State Library, where she manages CVL Collections, a program that helps small cultural heritage organizations get their digital collections online using the Omeka platform. The program is also an on-ramp to participate in the Plains to Peaks Collective, the Colorado and Wyoming hub of the Digital Public Library of America. In addition to managing CVL Collections, Amy publishes the Friday Grab Bag, a weekly series highlighting Colorado library programs and events. She has over 15 years of library experience in cataloging, metadata, technical services, electronic resources, serials, and collection management at academic and school libraries.

Leigh Jeremias

Leigh Jeremias is the Digital Collections Senior Consultant for the Colorado State Library where she manages the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection and the Plains to Peaks Collective, the Colorado-Wyoming Service Hub of the Digital Public Library of America. Ms. Jeremias has over 21 years experience working to make historical collections more accessible to the widest audience possible. She has extensive experience in the development, care and refinement of archival and digital collections as well as knowledge of several collection management databases, metadata schemas and aggregation, copyright and risk assessment, and project management. Prior to working at the State Library, Ms. Jeremias worked at History Colorado and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pa. In her current role she works to expand state and national access to all types of historic collections found at both small and large cultural heritage institutions.

Miranda Doran-Myers

Miranda Doran-Myers is currently the Technical Services Librarian for the Colorado State Publications Library. Her professional interests include government transparency and any other topics surrounding intellectual freedom – feel free to get in touch if you have similar interests and want to chat! Miranda holds an MLIS from Florida State University.

Samantha Hagar

Samantha Hager is the Outreach and Digital Repository Librarian for the Colorado State Publications Library. She has been helping researchers and sharing her enthusiasm for Colorado government information for over 15 years. Samantha holds an MLS from Indiana University.

Molly Bassford

Molly has almost ten years of experience in public and prison libraries. She currently works on the Institutional Library Development team at the state library where she supports adult prison libraries and youth services libraries. Molly is passionate about a people-centered approach to librarianship with a focus on diverse and underserved users.

Renée Barnes

Renée Barnes happened upon the field of correctional librarianship in 2005 while searching for a job. She began working as a library technician in a correctional facility and hasn’t considered working with any other population since. She supervised the libraries at Colorado State Penitentiary and Centennial Correctional Facility before coming to the State Library as a Senior Consultant in March 2013. She was promoted to Director of Institutional Library Development (ILD) in 2021. ILD’s work is currently focused on supporting staff learning and development, implementation of institutional library practices that support user experience principles, and contributing to standards, evaluation, and reporting projects for institutional libraries.

Victoria Parnell

Victoria Parnell is the Librarian II for the Denver Complex of the Colorado Dept. of Corrections. Her first experience in the library world was at a public lending library way back in Alabama, where she worked for several years as part of the circulation team. Wanting to live close to mountains, Victoria moved to Colorado…right before a pandemic, and was hired as a tech in the same library where she works at now. It was a learning curve!