Sarah T. Snow

Prior to attaining her M.S.I.S. degree at SILS, Sarah had a 20 year career as a network consultant and later business executive for BellSouth, AT&T and MCI. She then became a self-employed Information Management consultant, doing project work for various Atlanta-based corporations and consulting firms such as Accenture. 

Sarah's expertise expanded over these years based on industry trends and morphed from technical network design to technology integration to application development.  She found that the growth of Internet capabilities and the use of virtual, shared processing (now coined “Cloud Computing”) required a re-thinking of how disparate information was collected, referenced and used to form knowledge.

"The focus of my M.S.I.S. degree was the changing role of traditional public information sources, such as Libraries, and how they needed to re-create themselves from text-based archives to digital-based trusted domains of knowledge," said Sarah. "My studies were heavily centered on understanding: A - how metadata can be developed and used; B - digital information management techniques / applications; and C - how to create or verify sources of truth from unrelated information providers.
 
"Since graduation in 2004, I have used my expertise in creating trusted knowledge domains to develop industry and application-specific information repositories based on services and technologies from companies such as Google, Oracle, and Akamai," she said. "My current business interest is how to evaluate, parse, and integrate into knowledge domains the video and digital images from un-managed sources such as Facebook and YouTube.  Much of my work is directly applicable to proactively managing the changing role of libraries from text-based sources of information to integrated knowledge centers that become trusted brokers in an unverified digital universe."