Team Spotlight: Troy Scott, Implementation Specialist

Troy’s life has long revolved around libraries. Prior to becoming an Implementation Specialist, he was a graduate student in European and American history at the University of California Santa Cruz where he estimates spending 40 hours a week in the library doing research on religious radicalism in Colonial North America. Troy is a published author and continues to write alongside his work with StackMap. Although books are a strong force in his life, these days, he’s grateful to have a much more interpersonal job.  

I spent so many years of my life basically living in libraries in undergraduate and grad school, and I see the value in the [StackMap] product and the extensibility of it. Grad school is an extremely solitary lifestyle. You spend a lot of time in the archives, and your lifeblood is hunting down resources that you need for your research. Having StackMap would have made that work a much, much quicker process for me. It would have certainly sped up the pace of the things I didn’t want to do so I could just get to my research and reading. 

One day, I got so frustrated with some school project, and I asked my roommates who were both getting their doctorates in computer programming to show me what they were doing. Soon after, I ended up leaving grad school with my masters and going directly into software development. 

I really love that we’re a small team at StackMap. I’m the point of contact for the clients during the collection mapping process, and my role is to get data from the clients and then provide them with the implementation of their data into their application. I work to ensure that the integration process goes smoothly and that everything is up and running to their expectations. In other words, I’m the person who injects StackMap into the libraries’ catalog searches — basically a liaison between the client and the software development team. 

It feels really good to see things work out for the clients when you execute a support request and strategize to make sure that StackMap is serving them in the way that they expect and it’s helping their libraries.