‘It’s a happy career.’ Retiring employee, who ushered Riverhead library into the digital age, reflects on his years of service

Riverhead Free Library just lost a wealth of institutional knowledge, with the retirement last week of David Troyan, the library’s technical services coordinator. 

Troyan, 56, has a long history with the library, having first started working there as a page when he was a student at Riverhead High School. After graduating in 1986 — as salutatorian of the class — Troyan went to Hofstra University, where he majored in computer science, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1990. He continued working at the library while in college, too.

He’s just always loved the library — “It’s my hometown library,” Troyan explains. In some ways, it’s been like home to him. Libraries and learning go hand in hand, after all. And learning is another of Troyan’s lifelong passions. 

After he earned a master’s degree in computer science at Hofstra in 1991, he went to Stony Brook University, where he earned a second master’s degree, this time in applied mathematics.

In 1993, he was at the Riverhead library checking out a book when he heard that the library was looking for someone to work in computer services. He inquired and he got the job heading up the library’s computer services department.

“It was a very rudimentary network,” he recalls. “There were only a few computers. The internet was a dial-up modem.” He pauses. “There was really no internet to speak of — only a listserv. It was very simple.”

Then Troyan shares a memory that only a local guy working at this particular job at his hometown library would hold close.

“One person came in every single day. He was so curious about the thing. Herb Dresher of Ivan shoes,” Troyan recalls fondly. 

Dresher and his wife Fran were the longtime owners of a shoe store on Railroad Avenue, a few blocks away from the library. They were a local couple  who lived and worked in Riverhead, and anyone who grew up in Riverhead, like Troyan, knew Ivan Shoes and its proprietors. They probably got their first pair of shoes there. 

“He would come in during his lunch break, sit at that computer with the dial-up modem and he would log in,” Troyan said.

Technology has driven the most significant changes at the library since Troyan started working there, he said. 

“The internet and technology — it just blew up,” Troyan said. 

In the early days, he remembers, “To get email, I had to log on to a fax machine. No icons, no windows. It was all on the command line.”

Besides growing the library’s computer network and bringing the library into the digital age, Troyan was instrumental in the library’s physical expansion project as well. 

Liz Stokes, who worked at the library for 34 years before her retirement in 2019, remembers when Troyan started as a page and when he came to work full-time there in 1993. 

“I watched him design the computer system, the phone system…He was part of the construction team with the Board of Trustees,” she said.

Troyan was also part of a working group that brought Suffolk Web to the county. That was an internet service provider sponsored by the Suffolk Library System that allowed library card holders to have access to a free library email address. 

By 2001, Troyan was the library’s assistant director. As much as he loved his work at the library, an opportunity arose at Brookhaven National Lab that he couldn’t pass up. 

“It was always my dream to work in science,” he said. He landed a position in the atmospheric science group at BNL — and he loved it. 

“As soon as he left, he was asked to join the Board of Trustees,” Stokes said. He did, helping to guide board policy and library management.

Troyan worked at the lab for 17 years. Then his job was moved from BNL to Tennessee. “I wasn’t about to go to Tennessee,” he said. 

He returned to Riverhead Free Library in 2018, hired by the library’s current director, Kerrie McMullen-Smith to handle computers and information technology.

Troyan and his assistant rewired the library’s computer lab and worked to enhance the library’s computer network.  

In 2019, there was an opening in technical services, and that attracted him because of his interest in working with databases. 

“Technical services works with the books and processes the books, a lot of database work, which  is more in line with my interests,” Troyan said. “The computer information department was in charge of the computer lab, so you dealt with the patrons and all the technology.  On the surface it sounds fine but you’re under a lot of pressure to make sure it’s in working order,” he said.

“It really requires a specialist in network administration,” and that was not aligned with his interests or expertise.

“When you work at a library, it’s really about the people,” Troyan said. 

He realizes a lot of people say that about a lot of jobs, but working at a library in your hometown, “the connections are just immense,” he said.

There are the regulars, the library patrons he’s known for a long time. Then there are people he’s known his whole life, and people his parents knew.  

“For instance, someone came about a year ago and called me out onto the floor because they had a picture that my father gave them when he was in high school,” Troyan recalled.  “It’s that kind of thing.”

And “that kind of thing” makes working there very special.

“Also the staff,” he adds. “I receive so much good will from staff, especially when I first started working here. The staff was like older people, and boy, they treated me so nice. And now I’ve kind of made it a mission to repay that.”

Lately, it’s been his turn to be that older, more experienced staff member, and he’s enjoyed it.

“I’ve made a lot of good friends,” he said.

“Once you have Dave for a friend, he’s a friend for life,” Stokes said. “I wish there were more people like him.”

He’s active in Riverhead Rotary and a eucharistic minister at his church, she said.  

Troyan will remain a familiar face at the Riverhead library. “I use it. It’s my home library,” he explained.  

Next on tap for Troyan, after maybe a couple of months off, will be writing, which he enjoys, and “tinkering around” with GIS mapping. “I need to keep busy,” he said. 

Troyan was a presenter at the Long Island Library Conference on his last official day as a Riverhead Free Library employee last week. Troyan and a staff member from Brentwood gave a presentation on using mapping software and public libraries, McMullen-Smith said in an interview Friday. 

“It was a very interesting program,” she said. “He has the kind of mind that thinks about getting information, things that other people wouldn’t normally think of.” Troyan, with all the skills he has, and the institutional knowledge he has, will definitely be missed, she said.

“He’s brilliant,” said Stokes. “He’s got a gift. He always wants to keep learning. And he always wants to help others learn.”

Helping others is how Troyan is wired, and it’s what he’s enjoyed most about working at the library.

“Think of all the positive things the libraries have done, helping people” on Long Island, he said.  Troyan found himself contemplating that during the conference.  “The people there, people who work in libraries, were happy,” he mused.  Sure, they are stressed from day to day, just like people in any field, he said. 

“But when you do something like building a building, connecting a community, when you serve patrons well, it’s a very happy career,” Troyan said.