Beatrice Downey
Name Pronunciation
bee-uh-tris down-eePronouns
She / HerTo acknowledge that assumptions about someone’s gender identity could be incorrect, many organizations, including NC State, have begun to encourage community members to include a brief statement of their gender pronouns as they introduce themselves within a group.
Ask Me About...
Selected Works
- From Chaos to Clarity: Improve your library’s web presence with content strategy [Webinar] (Choice LibTechInsights Webinar, 2024),co-presented with Robin Davis
- Conducting Pop-Up User Research That Moves a Project Forward (TRLN Annual Meeting, 2023), co-presented with Robin Davis
- Database Descriptions: Do the Write Thing [Poster] (ACRL Conference, 2023), co-presented with Rebecca Graff
My Projects
Shout-outs From My Colleagues
Shout-outs are kind words from Libraries staff to other Libraries staff for going out of their way to be extra awesome at their job.
Robin & Bea made the task of revising our department landing page a great experience. Our team really appreciated and enjoyed being able to exercise our creativity and learn best practices for users. The results speak for themselves and we can't wait to work on the rest our site with them.
— Sandra Varry
Over the past year, Beatrice Downey has worked to wrangle the Libraries' 150+ (and growing) videos in order to improve the browsing experience for users and the organization experience for staff. During the first phase of this project, Bea went through all the existing videos and categorized them by topic. She was always receptive to feedback and suggestions from stakeholders along the way. Once the videos were appropriately categorized, she added desired features like a search bar and a "sort by" dropdown. The resulting page (lib.ncsu.edu/videos) is a great improvement for users and library staff alike! After she had brought order to the videos page, she turned her attention to our old tutorials and interactive guides page. She worked with others in the User Experience Department to rebrand that page as a Learn on Your Own page (https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/learn-on-your-own). I'm particularly excited about the opportunities this page will afford us to continue to present non-video asynchronous learning materials to our community! Thanks so much, Bea, for your dedicated efforts toward this project!
— Anne Burke
Bea recently co-presented "Conducting Pop-Up User Research That Moves a Project Forward" with me at the TRLN 2023 Annual Meeting. That presentation was about a larger-than-usual user research study for which she willingly and capably took the lead when I (the original organizer) had to be out sick. She ensured that everyone knew their roles, split up the set-up work, and dealt ably with multiple curveballs. Bea's leadership, organizational skills, and sheer competence are a boon to the Libraries!
— Robin Davis