explodedlibrary.info

preparing to leave libraryland

Ok, first things first. The possibility which I was writing about in my last post has become real. I have been offered - and have accepted - a job outside of libraries. I’m feeling both excitement and trepidation about this. It’s similar to how I felt when I first decided to move from Australia to the USA.

I am packing my bags and moving from Libraryland to Regulatoryland*. I don’t know if I’ll return to Libraryland or not, but I’m planning on taking my new life in Regulatoryland seriously. I’m certainly not visiting for a short holiday.

Although sometimes I have been pessimistic about the future of libraries, those notions are not what is driving this decision. It’s ultimately a personal choice about what is best for me at this moment. The bigger questions about the future of librarians are just background.

How can I continue to maintain a blog called the exploded library if I am not actually working in a library?
This blog has rarely been about my day-to-day work in a library. It’s been more about various ideas seen through a library-related lens. That’s unlikely to change, because for the time being I’ll keep my librarian’s perspective - it’s who I am. The difference is that now I’ll be someone who uses libraries, and who cares a lot about libraries. I will represent that important but sometimes challenging client, the librarian client.

Until next Thursday, I’m working at the Australian Taxation Office’s library. The ATO** is a very large organization - employing over 25,000 people. Serving that many potential clients is not easy, and so something the ATO Library is constantly doing is getting into the heads of our clients (and potential clients), to work out better ways of helping them do their work. In my current position, it would be very helpful know what a very engaged user is thinking about library-related issues. That’s something I may be doing here in this blog.

This blog is about to enter a busy period, as it does occasionally. There are quite a few ideas for posts floating around in my head, which I’d like to write down before I start my new job. This means I’ll be posting every other day for the next two weeks or so.


*Because of how I interpret the APSC social media rules, it’s better if I don’t disclose here which agency I’ll be working for. It’s just simpler this way.

**My experience of working for a tax collecting agency will be something I’m blogging about soon.

the path not taken

I’ve been fortunate to work as a librarian in libraries for most of my career. There have been three exceptions, and they corresponded with particular transitional moments in my life.

[If you’re curious about the three exceptions]

Now I’m seriously considering a job outside of libraries. This would be the first time I’ve deliberately left a library job to work in a position that is not library related.

I do this with some trepidation. Why am I considering something like this?

I feel that I’m approaching the point in my career and age where it’s going to start to become difficult to change careers. If I want to try something different, I should try it now, or it may not happen, and then I’ll be forever wondering about the path not taken.

I have a law degree, and although I find that it gives me a good grounding in the legal and tax research which I do in my current job, I’m not using that degree as much as I’d like to.  I do feel frustrated sometimes, that I’m just helping people find information - and then they use it to make decisions and take actions. Being a generalist is great and necessary I think, but a part of me is craving to go really deep into a subject and be a part of that team which is actually using the information to make decisions.

I expect that I may need to work for 30 or so more years. Libraries are definitely changing - and they need to change to survive (I don’t think this idea is controversial any more). I’m realizing that a part of me loves the old school research role. That’s what I really enjoy - the thrill of the chase. I’m worried that this role may become more marginal in libraries. I see the former pillars of the profession - cataloguing, circulation and even reference - in decline, systems continuing to grow and new areas developing. Training is not really new for libraries, but if we do what needs to be done in this space, our training and our libraries may be unrecognizable from what we have today. A commitment to marketing and client management that is deadly serious and overriding. Developing new roles such as co-designing content for clients.

I want to develop a second string for my bow. Just in case libraries change in such a way that the work I really enjoy becomes less important in the future. In previous jobs I’ve locked horns with some librarians who hate how libraries have changed recently, but they don’t feel qualified to do anything else and so they’re just hanging in there until retirement, disengaged and completely miserable - and making their colleagues miserable. I really don’t want to be that sort of librarian in 20-30 years! So I want to be proactive and think about the actual work I’d like to be doing, rather than thinking “I have always been and will always be a librarian, and will go wherever that path takes me.”

It’s not definite yet that my career is changing in this direction, but I’ll know for sure soon. The librarian leaving the exploded library is not necessarily the end of this blog. Who knows, the change could give it a new lease of life.

weather

The 2011 Australian law librarian conference, ACTioning the Law, starts tomorrow afternoon in Canberra. I’m a little worried about the weather. The conference opens with the Publisher’s Panel at the National Library, this is followed by the Welcome Reception at the High Court. Normally it’s a very easy walk, from the National Library just walk past Questacon and the National Portrait Gallery, and you’re at the High Court. But if it’s raining quite heavily, then that won’t be so fun. I suspect that tomorrow morning the organizing committee will be looking into booking taxis or some other contingency plan.

This will be the fourth consecutive law librarian conference I’ve attended. I blogged during both the Perth and Darwin conferences, and I tweeted last year at Melbourne. I’m not sure what I’ll do be doing this year, because it’s different when you’re on the organizing committee. I’ll definitely be maintaining the @actioningthelaw twitter account as well as attending to any urgent updates which need to be made on the conference web site. I’ll be spending some time at the registration desk and the trade show, and if things go well, I’ll be able to enjoy some of the sessions and hopefully tweeting under the @explodedlibrary handle.

I’m really looking forward to catching up with colleagues and former co-workers who are attending from interstate - we know that Canberra is not considered the most exciting venue for a conference and I certainly appreciate every registration.

Right now I’m suffering from some pre-conference nerves, hoping that everything goes ok and if there are any problems (as there are in any conference), that we can respond to them effectively and that people will be forgiving. I expect that it’s going to be crazy few days for me and other people on the committee, but I’m looking forward to enjoying what I can and doing what I can help with whatever comes up.

Being on this conference committee has been my recent excuse for not blogging here lately. That’s about to end too.

crunching the gearbox

A few weeks back I drove a manual (stick shift) car for the first time in four and a half years. It wasn't too bad, I eventually remembered how to use the clutch and worked out the feel of the gears, but it was awkward at first. The worst moment has when I needed to downshift from 5th gear to 3rd, and I think for the horrible moment I think I was in 2nd, and there was that horrible sound of gear crunching as I tried to fix things up. But most of the time I'm not such a terrible driver.

If only I could manage my life as well as I can manage a car.

I’ve been sick with a cold for the last few days. It’s not the worst cold I’ve had, although according to somebody who seemed to have this one about a week earlier than me - I’m now about to enter the phlegm stage. Sorry, that’s probably way too much information...

Moving right along then. One thing about getting sick is that it forces you to change gears. At least it does for me. In the last few weeks I've been feeling rejuvenated - in my writing, exercise and diet, and just trying to live a better a life. Then I get sick and I have to change my focus onto recovery. I'm worried that that I'm going to have trouble switching gears again from sick mode back to healthy mode.

All this has happened before. In fact it's happened so often that I'm eventually seeing the pattern. I feel that I've finally turned the corner, that I'm cruising along quite well, until something happens which forces me to switch gears. It could be an illness or a relationship issue or work hassles or moving hassles or some family problem or whatever. Maybe I handle the hazard well or I don't. The problem is that when that hazard has passed, I forget to speed up again.

So this post is a conscious signal to myself: Get ready to change gears and make some progress before the next slow down happens. Because there will always be something which comes along and forces us to slow down.

creating an identity

I’m a member of the organizing committee of the 2011 Australian Law Librarians’ Association (ALLA) conference. The conference is going to be here in Canberra towards the end of September. Its theme is ACTioning the Law.*

One of my tasks has been to create an online identity for the conference.

I’ve made some of the basic components, a web site (not quite finished yet, all of this stuff will be launched next week), registering a domain name, creating a Gmail account and finally, a Twitter account. But really, the work involved seems minuscule compared with the amount of internet magic involved.

Creating this new identity for the conference has got me thinking about my own online identity and how it’s been virtually non-existent lately. For a while I was thinking that the explodedlibrary blogging identity was already dead, and that if I were to ever blog again, it would need to be a complete “reboot” with a different name.

I’ve decided not to do that, for now. It’s been so long that I feel as if I’m a new blogger again.

Where did I go and what’s happened?

A dysfunctional workplace will put my blogging into a coma. Maybe it would be different if I felt I could write publicly about the dysfunction. Without going into details, the actual library and the work I did there was fine and enjoyable, but the relationship between the library and the branch in charge of it was completely dysfunctional. When I’m working in a stressful environment, I find that when I get home, I need to un-stress. For me, that means doing stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with my work. This blog has always been work-related to some extent, and that was a real problem when I needed a complete break from work during my evenings and weekends.

But things are different now. I have a new librarian job in a different federal government agency in Canberra. It’s a change for the better, and I’m returning home from work feeling more energized than drained. I feel that it's possible for me to blog again.

Maybe a recent death in my family has caused me to tire of this fallow phase. My dear aunt deserved many more years of good health than what she had. Life’s not fair and terrible things can happen at any time to anyone. I don’t know how many years I have left. I’d rather use the time I have left doing something I believe in, than immersing myself in frivolous past times which ultimately mean nothing - although my Worgen mage was getting so close to be getting ready for heroic dungeons in World of Warcraft Cataclysm :)

I’ve been thinking about getting back into blogging for some time and I think that in 2011 it’s going to be different from previous years. I view myself as a law librarian but the majority of my posts have been about library issues rather than legal issues. I think the balance will be shifting this year and I’m more interested in following legal issues, particularly developments in consumer and competition law. But I also plan to resume following the general conversations which librarians are having and participate in those when I have something to say.

15 comments (and 5 posts) in 15 days

I had a little epiphany last week when writing up a post for Libraries Interact about day 9 of the 30 posts in 30 days event. The result is that I’ve decided to set myself a modified challenge that’s more realistic for me. Starting today, 15 comments (and 5 posts) in 15 days.

Anyone else is more than welcome to try this, but for me, it’s just a personal goal. The posts, which will average at about one every three days (a massive increase for me, considering my recent activity), will probably be here, but they could possibly be in the exploded library bunker or Libraries Interact or LiveJournal or Vox or that which must not be named.

But the main part of the challenge is the commenting. Although one comment a day is not at all onerous, it will make me focus on reading other blogs more actively than I have been in the recent past. This can only be a good thing. I still feel as if I am settling into my new life in Canberra, and I hope that this goal will instill good habits to improve my blogging and involvement in the blogging community.

The numbers of comments and posts and days are just minimums.

unconnected and inspired

As I write this I have no internet connection at home. Of course, I use the internet all day at work, but would never contemplate working on this blog there. Anyway, I’m writing all of this offline, with the intention of uploading it when I’ve got my home connection sorted out.

We take things for granted, and I wonder if this situation of not being able to blog has made me want to blog again. That, and the fact that my daily commute is way shorter than it was than when I lived in Sydney. My guess is that it’s been halved and then halved again.

being the senior librarian

My career has changed recently. I’ve had a management role - only in an acting capacity during a maternity leave absence, but nonetheless I got to experience a lot of the good things and bad things which managers have to deal with. I’ve learned from this experience that I can do this management work, and wouldn’t mind doing it again. The experience also made me appreciate the perks of not being a manager. My new role (I’m not naming my new workplace here, other than to say it’s a Australian government agency) is not a managers role, and I’m really enjoying just having to worry about doing my own job.

But it’s not entirely back to how things were before. I am officially the second in charge of this library, and when my supervisor is away, I am in charge.

It’s a big change for me to be a senior librarian, someone who is responsible for coaching and mentoring less experienced staff. It reminds of two people I’ve worked with before who were more senior than me - one example I’d like to emulate, the other one I’d like to avoid.

I don’t want to be like the senior librarian who would roll her eyes in disdain when asked for assistance or advice with research, because it was all too easy for her. This person was extremely set in her ways, and fought tooth and nail to resist any change or improvement in library services or operations. I don’t want to be like the person who would speak glowingly of all the people who used to work in the library and expound on how better things were before. I don’t want to be the one who was constantly backbiting and undermining her manager. Most importantly, I don’t want to be the senior librarian who made sure that she was always given the most interesting and challenging research queries, and never shared any insights she learned from her research.

But I do want to be the senior librarian who gave rock solid support to the library manager, who could speak for the manager and was usually more approachable, being around more often and slightly less busy. I want to be like the one who would attempt to help me with my problems, even if they weren’t in her area of expertise, helping me identify the next steps and solutions by talking through the problem, and then, gently encourage me to work these things out for myself. I want to be the one who could be open to my crazy ideas about new-fangled library technology, suspend disbelief and tell me what I’d need to do to get these ideas accepted by management. I want to be like the senior librarian who shared her knowledge - whether of research techniques, or of the organization.

Autumn in Canberra

Canberra is an unusual city - most Australians seem to have a hate-love relationship with it. Canberra is both a city and a symbol of the Australian federal government. People complain that it is boring city without a centre and a soul, full of dull government workers.

But since I decided to accept this job and move to Canberra, I’ve had a lot of people say to me - almost as a confession - that they actually like the place - that they enjoy visiting its institutions and restaurants, and have some good friends there.

Canberra supposedly has a crap nightlife, meaning that there are no night clubs or venues worth visiting. I don’t know whether this is true or not, and I don’t really care. I’ve already discovered some good restaurants and bars in Canberra - in Civic, Dickson, Kingston and Manuka. I don’t like night clubs anyway, but enjoy being able to walk around on a Saturday night without being worried about drunken louts, which is an improvement from Sydney.

I like that the Australian Capital Territory is mostly national park, and that the beautiful Namadgi National Park is only a short drive from where I’m living, and that I have another nature reserve just across the street where I’m living. I like that Canberra is full of trees and bike tracks. I visited Canberra a few times when I was growing up, usually in the hot and dry (but not humid) summer or in the chilly winter - chilly by Australian standards. But unlike a lot of places in Australia, Canberra has four distinct seasons. I’m really enjoying the autumn here, the cooler evenings, and the leaves of the deciduous trees turning to gold and red.

It’s different in Sydney. The leaves of deciduous trees tend to stay green well into the autumn, even into the winter, then one day they turn brown and drop all at once. For someone who fell in love with the beautiful and gradual fall colours in Minnesota, this seems so wrong.

But this post isn’t about saying good riddance to Sydney. Sydney is only a shortish drive away (I should know, I’ve done that drive a lot lately), and I know I’ll be back there often - for family reasons as well as to see national and international acts which would never make it to Canberra. I’ll definitely miss the Blue Mountains, a unique place which I won’t be able to visit so often any more. On the other hand, I look forward to exploring some of places surrounding Canberra - Batemans Bay and the South Coast of New South Wales aren’t very far away, not to mention Cooma and Jindabyne and the Snowy Mountains.

One last thing I’ll say about Canberra is that it’s a good place to be a law librarian. There seem to be many opportunities for librarians with legal or business research skills, both in the public sector and private sector. There are some amazing places to aspire to work at if you’re a librarian in Canberra: the National Library of Australia, the Parliament of Australia, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Treasury Department, the High Court Library, to name only a few. If you’re a new librarian and want this to be your focus, you could do a lot worse than move to Canberra. The process for entering the Commonwealth Public Service can be intimidating, but it seems that the placement agencies are having a hard time filling positions, and temping is a good a way of getting experience and getting your foot in the door.

no longer maintaining US permanent residency

One of the posts which has generated a few questions for me is this one from 2005, where I mention returning to the US once a year in order to retain my US permanent residency.

Since I made that post, a couple of things have changed.

Most importantly, there’s updated information from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services about this. It’s not very long, so anybody with a real interest in this topic should read the “Maintaining Permanent Residence” section for themselves. I’ll just point out one thing:

You may be found to have abandoned your permanent resident status if you:
Move to another country intending to live there permanently [my emphasis]

When questions of intention arise in this context, it is not so simple that an immigration officer might ask you what you intend, you tell her/him that you don’t intend to live in the other country permanently, and they just accept your word. No, US Citizenship and Immigration Services determines this intention from your actions.

I have found a few online sources which provide some information about how this intention might be determined. See here, here and here.

The bottom line is that just as it is usually a lot of work and hassle and paperwork to initially obtain a green card, it is not a trivial thing to keep it while while living long term in another country.

This leads me to the other thing which has changed since 2005. Since learning more about the requirements for maintaining permanent residency, I decided that I couldn’t justify doing all these things to keep open the extremely slim possibility that I may one day return to live and work in the US on a long term basis. In my first year back, which was fairly difficult, it was nice to keep that option open. But things have changed, and I feel a lot more at home in Australia. I’ll definitely return to the US as a visitor. Who knows what the future holds, if I wish to work there again, I’d rather take my chances with one of the new E3 Visas for Australians.

Something I’ve learned, both from moving to the US as well as returning to Australia, is that changing countries is not easy - at least for me. In fact it becomes more difficult as you get older. Let’s say that one day I do return to the US for several years, well if that happened, I couldn’t ever see myself moving back to Australia - except for short visits. I don’t feel ready for that.