What do iProfessionals Do?
I help people accept the alternative
Kristin Centanni, a 2008 graduate of the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington, earned a combined master's in Information Science (IS) and Public Affairs (PA), taking coursework at both SLIS and the IU School of Public Affairs (SPA). Centanni worked in the office of both as a student.
Centanni is currently assigned to a project helping "a large transit agency in Chicago" upgrade its technology systems. Her focus is on change management.
"I'm dealing with people and processes, not the technology, mostly working to get people there to accept the alternative," she says.
"There are both politics and internal policy changes involved. We focus on how to communicate that to [employees] there. It also impacts the riders on the system, everyone who lives in the communities, and the whole public image of the enterprise."
I use computational approaches to model how genes interact with each other
Indiana University's School of Informatics, founded in 2000 as the first school of its kind in the United States, has officially awarded its first PhD in informatics. The doctoral degree to James Costello was formally recorded by the university on August 31.
Costello has already started postdoctoral work at Boston University with a fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute working with James J. Collins, a Rhodes Scholar who in 2003 became the first bioengineer to receive a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award." Collins is considered a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology.
"Essentially I will be using computational approaches to model how genes interact with each other," Costello said. "I will be working on both synthetic and systems biology projects involving bacteria and mammalian systems."
I protect the past
The New York Times reports on digital archivists, including Jacob Nadal, the preservation officer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.
Nadal and colleagues are part of an effort to organize and protect material in digital form. Their duties include licensing and buying digital content from vendors, assigning identification markers called meta-tags so that material can be found easily, researching copyright matters and ensuring that files remain intact whenever new iterations of relevant software or hardware come along.
Literature, film, scientific journals, newspapers, court records, corporate documents and other material, accumulated over centuries, needed to be adapted for computer databases. Once there, it had to be arranged — along with newer, born-digital material — in a way that would let people find what they needed and keep finding it well into the future.
The people entrusted to find a place for this wealth of information are known as digital asset managers, or sometimes as digital archivists and digital preservation officers. Whatever they are called, demand for them is expanding.