Alumni Success Stories
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 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.
Syracuse alumnus Michael Eisenberg receives top award from ALISE
Michael Eisenberg G’86, dean emeritus of the University of Washington Information School, received the 2009 Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Award for Professional Contribution. The ALISE Award is given to individuals who have advanced library and information science education through leadership roles, scholarly contributions, and sustained support of LIS educational initiatives. He will be recognized at the 2009 ALISE Conference in Denver in January.
Eisenberg, a graduate of the Ph.D. in information transfer program at Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool), began working at the school in 1977 as an adjunct faculty member and then later as coordinator of the school media and field work programs. He became an assistant professor in 1982 and worked his way through the tenure track to full professor in 11 years.
While employed at the iSchool, Eisenberg led the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) Clearinghouse, an online digital library of education research and information that provides comprehensive Internet-based bibliographic and full-text databases of education research and information, and then later founded the Information Institute of Syracuse, which included the award-winning AskERIC project.