SILS grad student continues family legacy of library science
After living all over the world with a family of librarians, William Boyer hopes to honor and evolve the family business through a career in digital archiving.
William Boyer has spent his life surrounded by books. Some of his most vivid childhood memories include sitting in a library or helping his parents shelve items on bookcases. For him, a library is more than just a resource, it’s a second home.
Boyer, a graduate student in the UNC School of Information and Library Science, is the son of two librarians who have worked in places like Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Shanghai, China, where Boyer spent a decade of his youth.
When he wasn’t at school, Boyer was watching his parents work at Shanghai American School’s library. That experience ultimately led him to pursue a master’s of library science at Carolina.
That wasn’t his original plan, though.
Boyer received a bachelor’s in cybersecurity and history from Montreat College, where he formed a deep connection with the small campus community in the western North Carolina mountains. There’s family history there, too — he spent many summers as a child with his grandparents in Black Mountain.
During his senior year, Boyer felt that cybersecurity wasn’t his true passion. Back living in the U.S., he found a sense of comfort while at a library, a place that reminded him of his parents and made him feel at home. In library science, he saw a way to combine all his skillsets into one academic focus.
“I began to think I could be a digital archivist,” Boyer said. “I had developed computer skills and was still fascinated with history. That combined with my knowledge of libraries just drew me to finding my next chapter.”
Boyer was already familiar with Carolina. As a child, he came to campus to undergo a series of corrective surgeries for cleft palate. Even at a young age, the work happening on campus left a lasting impact.
As a graduate student, he’s still in awe of the faculty, specifically citing Elliott Kuecker as a big influence on him during his studies.
“He, along with so many other people in the department, are not only great professors but huge resources for us who we can always come to when trying to figure out our next steps,” Boyer said.
Boyer has kept busy outside the classroom, too. He works as a digital archive graduate assistant at NC State, a role in which he processes born-digital material. He also served as senior vice president of the Graduate Professional Student Government.
While he left Montreat unsure of where his next step might take him, Boyer is now ready to use the skills Carolina has prepared him with to work in a field he loves. And he’ll be right back home — inside a library.
“While I’m focusing on a different aspect of library sciences than my parents, I still feel like I’m keeping up the legacy,” Boyer said. “Now I know what I want to be doing with my life and that’s working in an archive.”
