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It is a very interesting time. As I gear up for another ALA conference, in the very rare spare moments I encounter I’ve been reflecting a bit on my life, my career, and inevitably… this blog.

I’ve seen the signs– blogging is dead. Well, no it’s not. But I’m certainly not the only one I know who’s taken a hiatus. I know the arguments– Friendfeed and/or Twitter have killed blogs. However, in my case that’s really not it. I remain semi-active on Twitter, but I’ve rarely spent any time at all on Friendfeed.

I have a lot going on right now. The transition from Library School student to full-fledged MLS’d librarian happened in mid-April, when I gave my final capstone presentation. I thought, “Ah-ha! Now I will blog again.”

But I did not. I spent evenings with my daughter. We went for bike rides, we read aloud together, we went to the park, and we spent many, many hours on the swing in the front yard.

And I don’t regret a minute of it.

However, by late May I began to feel antsy again and I started putting together presentations, trainings, reading a few blogs here and there, etc. But I just haven’t had the extra time to blog. As you can see from my last “post”, I had intended on live-blogging the Rocky Mountain Innovative Users Group summer workshop—but I ended up needing to come back up to Boulder after our patron network crashed for most of the day.

Which leads me to why I’m really not blogging. It turns out that moving from a position where you have little power (and therefore little responsibility) to one of great responsibility is a huge shift in many different ways.

Before, I could spend the evening on a whim staying up late coding a cool website or mashup just because I thought it would be fun. I could head off to pretty much any meeting, conference, or committee that I could drive to and afford. I could spend my time exploring and playing with ideas and writing rants about what needs to change.

But now I actually have to *do it*.

There’s no one to blame anymore if things don’t turn out well. There’s no “administration” that won’t let me implement something cool for our department. There’s no lack of ability to control the purse-strings or to delegate the tasks. Now I have to figure out how to be the one to get buy-in. I have to figure out how to take ideas from conception to reality not just in my own little office sphere—but across an entire organization.

I have to manage people. Granted—I managed work-study students at the University Libraries, and I managed all kinds of folks in the past in restaurants, sales jobs, etc. But it’s very different managing people who are mostly older than you, who are highly skilled, and who just plain have a whole lot more experience than you. Let me say this—I am ever more grateful *every day* that I had a management class in library school and that the Colorado Association of Libraries Leadership Institute has been so fantastic. It has really taught me a lot and helped me through some pretty intense challenges.

I also have spent a lot of time adjusting to my new role as professional. It’s no longer my job to do all of the nuts and bolts of coding up some new web tool or bringing online a new gadget. That’s something I have to remember. Now it’s time to trust and, when necessary, coach my staff and let them go do it. I need to keep my head in the clouds for strategic visioning and future casting. I need to participate, contribute to, and help shape policy development. I need to empower others.

I have to remind myself of this every once in a while. I almost spent this last weekend at DrupalCamp Colorado because it was “cool”. But I would have come home and played with Drupal all night, and not paid attention to caring for myself, my house, my pets, or getting ready for ALA—not to mention handling my management responsibilities for the week. I had to step back and remember, “things are different now”.

And that’s just fine. It’s tough to be stretched in many directions. However, I prefer to think that’s just a process of expanding myself. Expanding who I am and what I’m capable of. I only hope I remain malleable like silly putty—and don’t crack like old rubber band.

See you in Chicago!

I’ve been working on the portfolio project for the end of my MLS program and it’s gotten me thinking. Yes, this is stuff I think about anyway, but it’s given me occasion to pause and reflect.

The library field is weird. No, really. I mean it.

It’s a field where some MLS programs think they should still exclusively teach theory, and some programs think that you need little more than practical applications, including computer programming.

It’s a field where you can still be the “Head of Technology” in your organization because 15 years ago you were the one person who knew how to change a printer cartridge, and a field where people like Blyberg are writing the next generation catalog after coming from the business world.

We have “librarians” who do little more than check out books to elementary school kids. And some who maybe if they’re good, (and their school understands their value), are also collaborating in developing the curriculum, in advancing info literacy, and in introducing digital literacy to their students.

We have “librarians” who do little more than copy-catalog all day, or who point to where the bathroom is. And we have “librarians” who spend their days answering fantastically challenging reference questions and their nights developing Web 2.0 learning programs for their library. We have “librarians” who run a network, some who do little more than maintain an ILS, some who develop cultural programming, and some who do ALL of these things.

We have “librarians” who are getting tenure by writing “I done good” articles and “librarians” who are creating new knowledge by drawing on the theories of other fields and pushing the envelope of what it means to be a “library” (whether they need to get tenure or not).

We have “librarians” who love their users and are fantastic at customer service and who give us a good name. And we have “librarians” (some of whom are highly esteemed in the field), who are openly contemptuous of their users.

The field is not in good shape. I don’t think adding “information” to the MLS is the answer, either. I don’t think that by further genericizing the profession by calling ourselves “Information Professionals” is any kind of an answer either.

I’m afraid we just might be making a mockery of ourselves. And we don’t have another 15 years to fix it. In 15 years the information landscape will have changed just as drastically as the web has changed us and if we don’t get serious we might just fall off the map completely.

It’s time to stop making our field generic in the I-schools, and to let our students get the specialized skill-set they need. And I don’t mean that you take a “track” that consists of three classes providing a shallow introduction to your area of specialization. I mean we need real, exceptional, challenging programs tailored to the specific specialties within our field. (Note: I don’t mean to suggest we should dispense entirely with theory, either. The theory is tremendously useful and important, it’s just not enough.)

I don’t agree with Karin (although I have tremendous respect and admiration for her work) that all librarians should learn programming. I think we need to go just the other direction. We need to get really good at what we’re responsible for, so that our organizations start cranking out the quality of service and innovation that rivals the commercial sector. I don’t want to go into business. I don’t think that the corporate model is perfect– but I do think we have to have the integrity as a field to admit that right now, they do innovation better. And for that matter, they do information better.

We better get moving, and we better get moving fast.