“I recommend to anybody—if you see a hole that could be filled—do it,” says Helen Hough, Systems Librarian for Open Source Applications, University of Texas at Arlington, and recipient of the 2015 APA Award for Excellence in Librarianship. That neatly sums up her approach to life and work, and most particularly, to her development of the Tests and Measures in the Social Sciences: Tests Available in Compilation Volumes database (TMdb).

For the few of you who may not have encountered it, the TMdb indexes tests and measures that have been published in books. Years ago, Helen found many of the students she worked with struggling as they tried to find tests they needed for research. To help them, she began going through books with tests on her own, indexing the location, and posting the information for them on the Internet. Once it was on the web, other librarians and students, similarly frustrated, found it and began to make use of it themselves. Continue reading →