Interview with William Mischo

Short Bio

William Mischo is Head of the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center and serves as Berthold Family Professor Emeritus in Information Access and Discovery at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. Bill has been involved in numerous grant-funded digital library projects, including the NSF Digital Library Initiative and the NSF National Science Digital Library, as well as the awarding of National Leadership grants from IMLS and several Mellon Foundation grants. Bill has published over 75 articles and conference papers and presented at more than 100 conferences. He was elected a Fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) in 2015 for advances in information technologies and was the recipient of the 2009 Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology from the American Library Association and OCLC.

Interview with Bill Mischo

What follows below is an e-mail interview that was conducted with Bill Mischo as part of the Mortenson Center Associates Program.

(1) Samuel: Can you briefly summarise your career journey thus far?

Bill: My interests are varied. I have an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and did graduate work in Math with the idea of obtaining a PhD. In the course of that work, I became very interested in computer applications and, in particular, in applications involving data processing and text processing and retrieval. In those days, the discipline of computer science was basically numerical analysis so to do a degree in data and text processing I needed to move to a Library and Information Science degree program – which I did at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  After completing this MA in Library Science, I began a career in academic libraries working as both a reference librarian and a systems or automation librarian. I learned how to combine the two areas and to also bring together the resources I needed to move through three generations of online catalogs to the discovery and delivery systems I currently design and build.

(2) Samuel: What influenced your decision to become a librarian?

Bill: Primarily my interest in computer applications in text processing and my desire to work in an academic, university setting.

(3) Samuel: What do you consider as the most exciting aspect about your current job?

Bill: The freedom and resources I have to pursue my interests in discovery systems, machine learning, and other digital library applications.

(4) Samuel: What do you hope to accomplish in your current role?

Bill: My career is, unfortunately, drawing to a close. I will be giving up the administrative responsibilities connected with the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center and will focus my remaining efforts on enhancements to the Easy Search discovery and delivery system, bibliometrics applications, and machine learning in library applications.

(5) Samuel: What pearls of wisdom would you have for anyone aspiring to follow your career footsteps?

Bill: I’m not sure I have any brilliant insights that will lead anyone down the pathway to success. And, of course, success can be defined in many ways. I would say if a person wants to be involved in innovative and creative activities connected with discovery systems or bibliometrics they need to read all they can read on those topics, develop expertise in a scripting language or multiple scripting languages, become a database expert, study a number of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), and dive into user studies.

Leave a Reply