Student Tracy Guza Interns with Getty Images

Community Profile

While working as an advertising agency producer and project manager, student Tracy Guza was a customer of Getty Images, using their stock photo library to license images for ads and websites. Now that she’s an MLIS student interested in digital asset management, Guza’s interning at Getty and gaining first-hand experience with taxonomy.

Guza, who expects to graduate in spring 2011, is working with editorial images, focusing on current entertainment events and making sure that “new celebrities” — both in the US and internationally — are findable.

“It’s a phenomenal experience working with the maintenance of a large scale e-commerce vocabulary,” she said. “I evaluate names, promote them to preferred terms in the vocabulary, and then add the variations, like misspellings that users might try to find the photos or footage.”

In addition to interning at Getty, Guza is also a student librarian at the Seattle Public Library. She’s working in Special Collections on digital projects, helping digitize more than 1,000 photos from the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. The project uses CONTENTdm and allows Guza to collaborate with staff on metadata elements specifically customized for this type of collection. Her project ties so closely to her INFO 281 Seminar in Metadata class that she plans to use it as the basis for her final project.

During high school and college, Guza worked at the Hazleton Area Public Library in Pennsylvania and briefly considered librarianship as a career but dismissed it as too staid. She instead embarked on a successful career in advertising, working for agencies including DDB Worldwide. She was living a life of “Mad Men”-style glamour– complete with the sleepless nights and heartburn – when she started to think about whether she wanted to keep up the pace for the next 25 years.

“Luckily, I was tasked with organizing a library of 15,000 images for a client at DDB Seattle, and the process reignited my interest in library and information sciences,” she said. “When I found out that the MLIS program incorporates emerging technologies and web design, I was sold.” She enrolled in the MLIS program and gravitated toward courses that emphasize digital services and emerging technologies.

As part of her career change, Guza recently gave a presentation on digital asset management for creative agencies at her first-ever library and information event, InfoCamp’s “unconference.”

“As part of the re-branding of Tracy Guza, I felt I needed to meet a lot of people, and one way to do that was to prepare a presentation,” she said. “I always think it’s a good idea to force yourself into public speaking.”