It’s been a big year for Nicky Martin (MSLIS '26). After graduating in May, he spent the summer as a junior fellow at the Library of Congress, which ended just in time for him to start a new position at the Claremont Colleges.
Before we get to your current job, let's talk about the Library of Congress position.
I was a remote intern with the web archiving section, working under Tracee Haupt Fugate, Carly Boerrigter, and Abbie Grotke. They have a web archive collection of about 13,000 websites, and they need to do quality assurance on those websites to ensure that what they've archived is faithful to the original site.
There's something called a headless browser: a web browser that you can program and automate. It would load up the web archive page, it would load up the live page, then take a screenshot of both pages. Next, computer vision algorithms would run to determine how similar those two images were.
This process allowed us to look at websites on a faster scale. I ended up doing about a thousand website comparisons, and you could see all a thousand in one place because they had their own screenshots, as opposed to having to load 1,000 webpages manually.
Where do you work now, and what is your role?
I'm an open publishing applications specialist at the Claremont Colleges. My job is split between two things. The first is processing, labeling, and uploading resources for our digital libraries. For example, our imaging experts photograph historic maps; I process these files, give them a unique identifier, input the metadata (written by a subject expert), and publish them on our institution's digital library website. The second is helping to publish open resources, like student theses, on our open-access repository. We have a quarter-of-a-million files online, and then on our servers, we have a half-million more files. I'm trying to figure out: what do we have? And how do we best preserve it and make sure it's accessible for folks today, but also hopefully decades and decades from now?
What do you like best about your job?
I really like the environment of the seven colleges all coming into one hub library and getting to talk with people about all sorts of topics that I would never otherwise encounter. Yesterday I was talking to someone about seaworm regeneration. I also really enjoy digital preservation and remediating the files and making sure they're in the right place. Getting to do that work is very satisfying.
What do you see as the most important impact of your work?
The idea that a file is preserved passively is somewhat true; it can just sit on the server. But without someone really stewarding those resources, they're not getting used. There's also more opportunity to look at the files from a longer perspective, or in a digital humanities way, that really does take a steward to help someone get set up to do that.
How did the iSchool at Illinois help you get to where you are today?
My favorite class at the iSchool was web archiving with Emily Maemura. I had so much fun learning about how the web is serving us information, but likewise how we can preserve and document it, and how it's always changing. It was really cool to learn at the bit level how a .png image is structured and how to compare it to another one, learning the math you would run on the pixels to determine: how are these different from each other?
For that class, I created a web archive of web comics with a group of colleagues, one of whom used a headless browser in that process. That was my first experience with the headless browser. Then, during my interviews for the Library of Congress internship, I mentioned that project, and they were talking about how working with the headless browser would be a helpful experience, because they wanted to apply computer prediction algorithms to their web archiving.
So the iSchool gave me direct educational experience in the areas where I was most interested, but it also gave me the opportunity to work in academia as a graduate assistant with MSLIS advisors Kristina Intinarelli and Talia Shaw, as well as with Glen Layne-Worthey and HathiTrust, which was amazing. I don't think I would have my job today without those experiences.
What advice would you like to share with iSchool students?
Find the thing that you like that your peers don't like and lean into it. Some people find bits and bytes boring, and I can understand why, but I find it interesting. If you really like something and are really passionate about it, and other people find it onerous to do, that might be the edge you can have in a competitive job market.
What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I enjoy reading and writing short stories, and I've read 88 books this year and hope to read 120.