According to national rankings at the time, there was no better graduate school of library and information sciences than the one at Illinois.
And as far as Dan Tonkery’s concerned, there was no better GSLIS professor than the incomparable Frances B. Jenkins.
“She was an amazing person and helped my career,” he says. “At its time and for many years, the graduate program at GSLIS was number 1 in the country. She was number 1 in my book.”
Now the New York-based president and CEO of the international publishing consulting company Content Strategies, Tonkery will soon mark the 50-year anniversary of graduating from a unique and challenging field of study.
“I was in a special biomedical information program that combined computing and information science. I spent my first 10 years at the National Library of Medicine, using my new skills to build automated solutions for information. I worked on the frontier of online systems. I left NLM and next worked at UCLA, managing and building systems to support information access,” he says.
From there, “I left the academic information community and moved over to the commercial side and have been active managing companies as a senior executive and have been the CEO and president of a number of companies.
“I semi-retired in 2009 and set up a consulting company that works with scientific publishers in managing the shift from print to electronic formats.”
