2003 Entrepreneurial Award

Getting to Know Karen D. Miller

The first graduating student to be selected to receive the C. Berger Group Entrepreneurial Promise Award at Dominican University, Graduate School of Library and Information Science is Karen D. Miller. According to Prudence Dalrymple, GSLIS Dean, Ms. Miller was chosen by the faculty “because she brings a fresh perspective and dynamism into core areas such as organization of knowledge and will be a leader as she builds the library and information field.” She embodies the characteristics of the Award, from her passion for strengthening LIS leadership in the corporate arena to make use of metadata for information management possible, to her commitment to organizing knowledge and cataloging, through her extensive scholarship in these areas. A seasoned business professional, Ms. Miller also holds a MS in Statistics from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and a B.A, Applied Mathematics from the University of Michigan. She rose from Technical Support Representative to Director of Technical Support at a national business software firm before choosing to leave full-time employment for full-time studies in the MLS program. Karen felt that she had advanced as far as she could in her original specialty and began searching for new challenges. Reaching the decision to change careers was a result of formal counseling and a reassessment of her own fulfillment goals. She had always enjoyed the management responsibility of her work and felt rewarded in guiding innovative employees. Now she is eager to apply these skills to her new path in information science and effect changes in ways things are done in this field as well.

Karen enrolled in the MLS program at Dominican University because it was a local institution offering on site in person classes leading to an accredited degree. She was delighted to be challenged by cataloging and other technical services courses and found that they were especially exciting to her. They stimulated ideas about changes she could make in this new career path, while her professors encouraged her to think about how she could accomplish them. In retrospect, Karen thinks quitting a secure job (and profession) to return to school was a major life-style change, but actually earning the degree in library science will be her major accomplishment. It required relearning how to write for the academic reader and giving up recreational reading for text books and research. She has one practicum left to complete before receiving her diploma later this summer: she will be working at Northwestern University on cataloging projects and then its on to realizing her dream.

Talking about dreams, Ms. Miller would ultimately like to return to the software industry, but this time targeting products for the library and knowledge management market. She’s acquired new insight into these applications and has product development ideas about how to improve them. And a management position there would be a perfect match. In the interim, Karen will be investigating technical services positions in academic settings in the metropolitan Chicago area.

As far as advice to other students goes, Karen recommends that they “keep an open mind when you start.” She entered Dominican University with a Knowledge Management Certificate in mind, but never took a course in that area once she discovered cataloging, focussing on that specialty instead. She also feels that meeting teachers’ demands for perfection is great practice for the future. “On a job, you have to figure out what your boss wants and do that,” said Karen. “When you figure out what needs to be done, you add value to an organization. Things you learn in school will help you in the real world, so you should let professors help you.”

Karen received her C. Berger Group Entrepreneurial Promise Award along with a $100 honorarium at the Beta Phi Mu initiation dinner held May 20, 2003 on campus. Ms. Miller resides in Park Ridge, Illinois with her husband, David Morris.