Florida State University School of Information alumnus Mark Nicolou recently accepted a position as a systems analyst at Florida Memory — the State Archives of Florida, which is the central repository for the records of Florida State Government. The Florida Memory website serves as one of Florida’s principal venues for citizens to access historical images, sound recordings and documents.

Nicolou earned a Master of Science in Library & Information Studies from the School of Information in 2013. He also owns a Master’s degree in Art History from Florida State.

“I do a little bit of everything on the backend of their website and database, developing core standards for their metadata as well as building some multimedia web-deliverable content,” Nicolou said.

Nicolou’s position is focused on working with the data of cultural heritage, and enabling access and usability to items and documents in the Archives.

“I work with the metadata of these collections, and on the searchability and access of these collections that have been digitized and have contextual information generated by the historians,” Nicolou said.

Courses like Museum Informatics and Metadata Theory and Practice piqued Nicolou’s interest in the field, and he continued to learn about the subject during an assistantship with Assistant Professor Richard Urban. Dr. Urban also helped him in pursuing the position at Florida Memory.

“The broad range of skills I was able to acquire through the coursework in addition to the relationships I was able to build with several professors are the reason I have this job,” Nicolou said.