Joe Ryan
Joe RyanMS in Library and Information Science ‘07Raleigh, North CarolinaBefore coming to the iSchool, I worked as a systems administrator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s General Library System. While at Madison, I witnessed firsthand how technology was transforming every aspect of librarianship. At Syracuse, I learned the building blocks of the library tradition within the context of the emerging Information Age. Syracuse’s curriculum was flexible enough to let me pursue my own interests in digital libraries, digital archiving, and user interface design without sacrificing my core library education. The faculty was fantastic, and I am still in touch with many of them. I urge any student who has a specialized interest in the information field to approach faculty members who appear to have similar interests. I spoke with Dr. Liddy about user interfaces for search engines, and ended up working on an extremely challenging (but very rewarding) project with The Center for Natural Language Processing and JSTOR.
Now that I have graduated and have started to work, I have realized that Syracuse is a very special place: because of my time at the iSchool, I can talk intelligently about almost any topic in the information field. The faculty and the students at Syracuse have such a diverse set of backgrounds and interests that it is difficult not to learn new things just walking down the hallway. This constant exposure to change has left me prepared to tackle any challenge that the library world has to offer.
I now work as a Library Fellow at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. At NCSU, I split my time between work in the Digital Library Initiatives department and a project to build a new library on NCSU’s Centennial Campus. I welcome correspondence at
josephdryan@gmail.com