Cindy Aden - Participant

Cindy started her career in newspapers working for the Palo Alto Weekly after graduating from Stanford University in International Relations. She moved to Seattle and worked for two more weekly papers, in Redmond and Edmonds, before attending graduate school in library science at the University of Washington. There she participated in an NSF grant on artificial intelligence with her graduate advisor, Raya Fidel.

Cindy’s library career started with an internship that led to a job at the Library of Congress where she worked in the Congressional Reference Department. From there she moved back to Seattle for a position at the University of Washington. She was part of a team that designed the search experience for a graphical user interface on an X-terminal using library data.

Cindy left academia to become an associate director at Kitsap Regional Library, where she rode a ferry to and from work every day. Amazon found her in 1998 and she was Amazon’s first librarian, working on the data side to create browse lists, direct a team of catalogers and finally direct the key engineering team that put the book catalog together. After 6 years she went to work for Bill Gate’s image company, Corbis, where she directed cataloging, metadata and search for 3-1/2 years. OCLC, the world’s largest library cooperative, was her next stop where she worked in business development for over 7 years working with Google, Bing, Goodreads, Yelp, and many start-ups and app developers who wanted to use library data and attract book lovers in their apps. She has been at the Washington State Library since August 2016.