Paul Marty and Michelle Kazmer met on the first day of class in the first semester of their PhD program.
Marty was well acquainted with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, having earned a BA and MA in history and BS in computer science from the university. Kazmer, who had previously worked at the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, was returning to the Urbana campus from southeast Michigan. She entered the PhD program with a BS in mechanical engineering from Columbia University and MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. Their first class was a doctoral seminar on “The Information Society,” taught by Michael Twidale, who was, appropriately, in his first semester on the faculty.
Little did Marty and Kazmer know that not only their graduate studies, but also their personal and professional lives, would move in tandem for the next twenty-eight years.
"At some point a few years into our doctoral work, we realized that we had really learned to be academics together, and that we were more attached to each other outside of school and work than maybe we had realized," the couple said.
In 2002, Marty and Kazmer married, accepted tenure-track faculty positions as assistant professors at Florida State University, and earned their PhD degrees. Before leaving though, they left a stealth gift for the iSchool students.
"The night before we left Champaign to drive to Tallahassee in August 2002, we drove a lovely floral striped couch over to the iSchool, carried it up the stairs, and left it in the doctoral student lounge," the couple shared. "We didn’t tell anyone we were doing that, and we don’t think anyone ever learned where that couch came from, but we weren't taking it with us to Tallahassee, so we thought we'd leave it for the doc students!"
The couple proceeded through their professional paths at FSU in tandem—tenure and promotion to associate professors in 2008 and promotion to professors in 2014. Kazmer now serves as dean of FSU’s College of Communication and Information, and Marty is FSU's associate vice provost for academic innovation.
Twidale served as PhD advisor to Marty, whose research interests include museum informatics, technology, innovation, and culture, user experience design, and life in the information society. Marty has worked with museums, and in the field of museum informatics, since the mid-1990s, studying the sociotechnical interactions that take place between people, information, and technology in museums.
Marty discovered the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (now iSchool) in 1996, when he was working at the World Heritage Museum at the University of Illinois. At the time, he was modernizing the museum's computer system and building databases to inventory its collections before the museum moved to its new location on campus.
"I met with Leigh Estabrook, who was dean at that time, and discovered that there was an entire discipline—one that I had never heard of before—that had dedicated literal centuries to studying all the questions that I was muddling my way through in this museum," he said. "They had the answers to all my questions about information organization, access, and management in museums. And that's what started me on the path that led me to where I am today, not just with my work on museum informatics, but also with my efforts to promote academic innovation."
He recently published a book, The Invisible History of Museum Computing, with co-author Kathy Jones, director of the museum studies program at Harvard University. In his role as associate vice provost for academic innovation, Marty works to coordinate, communicate, and facilitate efforts across the FSU campus to foster an environment that encourages and supports academic innovation.
"My efforts draw heavily upon the lessons that I learned at the iSchool at Illinois, where I saw firsthand the importance of bringing together people with diverse interests and diverse backgrounds, and how those interdisciplinary connections can position universities at the cutting edge of research and education," he said.
Kazmer was advised by Caroline Haythornthwaite, who also served on Marty's dissertation committee. Kazmer's initial research efforts focused on distributed knowledge in online learning communities—she was the first teaching assistant in the Leep (MSLIS online) program, which began the year before she arrived at Illinois. Later, she led the longitudinal qualitative assessment for the African American Alzheimer's Caregiving Training and Support project at Florida State University.
Her current research applies theories of information behavior to Golden Age crime fiction with a focus on Agatha Christie. This research has led to unique experiences, such as being a guest on BBC radio with Agatha Christie's great-grandson, serving as the first non-UK scholar to keynote the Agatha Christie scholarly conference in the UK, and watching the sunset on a beach in Hawaii with Sir David Suchet on an episode of Travels with Agatha Christie and Sir David Suchet on BritBox.
"The iSchool prepared me for my academic career and propelled me into a life I could never, ever have imagined when I was growing up in Washington, Pennsylvania," said Kazmer. "I'm grateful for my doctoral education every day, and proud to be an Illinois graduate."
Marty and Kazmer have two children—Evan, who is twenty and a junior at FSU, and John, sixteen and a sophomore in high school. They have called Tallahassee home for twenty-three years and love the city and community. Outside of work, Marty enjoys playing tabletop role-playing games (such as Dungeons & Dragons) and Kazmer takes ballet classes. Their family is heavily involved in Young Actors Theatre, a youth theater education program in Tallahassee. Marty made his stage debut this year as Daddy Warbucks in the production of Annie.