Audra M. Deemer, MLIS

Audra M. Deemer is the Head of Acquisitions and Collections for the University Library. In this position, she provides leadership to professional staff and oversees the Library’s collections budget used for purchasing materials including print and electronic ebooks, streaming video, and continuing resources like journals and databases. She negotiates with vendors on pricing and equitable license terms to ensure resources are beneficial to DePaul academic programs and accessible to library users.  

Audra grew up in Western Pennsylvania and earned her Bachelor of Arts in Media Arts from Pittsburgh’s Chatham College for Women and her Master’s of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from the University of Pittsburgh.   

Her previous professional library positions were based in Pittsburgh, PA but her work supported several educational systems and campuses in the U.S. and Canada, both ground and online. Her accomplishments included conducting numerous online and in-person instructional sessions, providing reference and research support by phone, email and chat, developing guides and tutorials, and serving as adjunct faculty to online students in Information Literacy courses. In addition, she was responsible for collection development in the subject areas of fashion design, graphic design, animation, film studies, and culinary arts, and designed and built the library website used by 50 campuses. 

Currently Audra writes film reviews for Educational Media Reviews Online, an open access database of critical film reviews written by librarians and teaching faculty. She has also served as the Business of Media and the Library columnist for the inaugural year of Stream Magazine, a digital magazine for media library professionals. Her first article for this publication was “What Does Equitable Mean to a Filmmaker, Distributor, and a Librarian?”. 

While pursuing her MLIS, Audra was assigned a research project on Chicago native Edith Granger (Hawkes), the first editor of An Index to Poetry and Recitations (now known as Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry). Her research continued after earning her degree and she eventually developed the website The Edith Granger Project which covers Granger’s professional and personal life. She continues to maintain this website today. 

 

Her professional interests include electronic resources collection development to support instructional and research activities, collection management and assessment to determine strengths and weaknesses in a library collection, the practice of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) and how it can enhance the accessibility of resources for library users and advocating for accessibility in library license agreements.  She is also earning her Master of Business Administration, with amanagement concentration, at DePaul with an expected graduation date of the Summer 2026.

 

Audra is a member of the American Library Association (ALA) and the sections for CORE: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures and the Film and Media Round Table (FMRT). She regularly attends the Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) conference, the Charleston Conference (a meeting for librarians, publishers, electronic resource managers, consultants, and vendors of library materials), and NASIG (formerly called the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc.).  

In her free time, Audra enjoys hanging out with her two dogs, exploring Chicago, baking, crafting, watching true crime documentaries, and learning American Sign Language (ASL). She also takes advantage of her CTA commute to read mostly memoirs and nonfiction books.