Hi, I’m Allison — sometimes Ally. I’m an MLIS student focused on archives and the digital side of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs), which is a fancy way of saying I like figuring out how institutions can organize, protect, and share the things worth keeping. This part of my website acts as a resource center on virtual communities, for anyone using, fostering, building, or participating in virtual communities as part of their own work.

Before starting this project for grad school, I spent twenty years in cybersecurity, anti-fraud, and trust & safety. This work taught me that protecting people online isn’t really about features or encryption…it’s about designing information environments that take security, privacy, and usability seriously from the start. That’s the same lens I bring to information studies now: information literacy, data privacy, and intellectual freedom aren’t separate from good systems design, they are good systems design.

In addition to being a builder and protector of information systems, my experience includes a fair amount of time spent in virtual communities myself…starting with newsgroups, LiveJournal, IRC, and online gaming communities, evolving into usage of all the major social media apps, moderating on Reddit, creating on Patreon, and hosting Zoom rooms with friends. That firsthand experience is part of what’s behind The Stacks: the sense that most guidance written for information professionals treats virtual communities as something to manage from the outside, rather than something worth understanding from the inside.

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