LAMP Spotlight: Corey Jackson

Are you working at a library or information science-related job? If so, what do you do at your job on an average day? I am not, but I am pretty close. I am a PhD student in Information Science and Technology at Syracuse University. I consider this a job so on an average day I have one class, 3 meetings, 1 brown bag, 40 emails, 6 academic journals to “read”, and homework. It is certainly a lonely endeavor, but contributing to and advancing knowledge is a great reward.

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What is/was your favorite LIS class and why? My favorite course at GSLIS was data mining taught by Vetle Torvik. I think this class taught many fundamentals of statistics and machine learning and allowed us to explore data using open source tools – a pretty “hot” topic now. This course was designed to give students a chance to experiment with their own datasets and then be able to say something interesting about the patterns and relationships.

What is your favorite aspect of library and information science and why? LIS is a unique field in the sense that it is likely the most interdisciplinary academic field. We have the ability to explore complex social issues such as freedom of information and then challenge ourselves by attempting to develop algorithms to support text retrieval. Each requires a different set of skills, but the people with those skills are housed under LIS. That diversity of knowledge in problem solving is unique to LIS.