SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com in perpetual beta

I started my morning by putting the finishing touches on my Promotion and Tenure Dossier.  I finished up my day by presenting a Webinar for CALI on Alternatives to Course Management Systems.  The former means that I spent the almost every free moment in the past week organizing and compiling all of my professional activities over the past year (and reviewing previous years.)   The later means that I had many moments of panic during the non-dossier compiling parts of my week where I thought to myself, “Holy cow, I cannot believe people actually want to listen to me talk about something.”   Combine these two together, and I have been feeling very navel-gazy and wondering how I got where I am.

I mean, a scant three years ago, I was an evening and weekend reference librarian.  I didn’t really do anything professionally outside of my daily responsibilities, except go to AALL.  (And at that AALL, I went to every program I registered for, I don’t think I went to any committee meetings, and I was in bed and asleep by 11pm every night – obviously I completly missed the point of conferences!)  Contrast that with the past 12 months, where I attended 8 conferences, gave 6 regional or national presentations, co-organized Lawberry Camp, taught 4 CLEs locally, wrote 3 short articles, (tried to) actively blog and my job duties are easily 3 times what they were at my FPOW.

So how did this happen?  Were anyone to ask me (and no one has, so that’s why I have a blog so I can foist my thougths upon people ), I guess I have the following three pieces of advice:

1. Find Your Passion

It’s not entirely accurate to say that at my old job I did nothing beyond my assigned duties.  We were very generously granted one day a week to devote to professional activities, informally known as our “Thinkin’ Days.”  (Oh, my father the farmer who does intense physical labor for a living loved hearing about “Thinking Days”, let me tell you.)  I had (and still have) a great interest in legal history and spent most of my Thinking Days reading books and articles on legal responses to the abolition movement in the Ohio valley and compiling notes for something would surely be a brilliant article.

Okay..a couple of things.

1. Reading about slavery and the abolition movement?  Depressing as Hell.
2. Paul Finkleman has been writing about this topic since before I was born and it was hard to find a unique topic to cover.
3. No really, you guys? Slavery was really, really bad.  You can’t imagine the horrors of it.
4. In additon to the crushing depression that came out of doing this research, it felt like work. Which, coming from my solid German farm background, I didn’t realize was a problem.  If it’s fun, it’s not worth doing, right?

WRONG.

When I arrived at UK Law, the reference department was myself and the Head of Public Services.   So no more Thinking Days and much more “how to do more with less.”  Much by accident, and because I was now on the day shift and seeing many more students, I happened to notice the prevalence of social networking sites used by them.  After a push from one of my oldest and dearest friends who was on the site, I joined MySpace.

From then on, it all sort of snowballed.  With my combined anthropology and information science backgrounds, I was fascinated by the changes to online culture (particularly how Web 2.0 makes it dead simple to have your own web presence and to interact with others) and how that affected the access and delivery of information.  Research and exploration of this topic didn’t seem like work at all!

2. Find Your Voice

Okay, so you’ve found something that interests you.  That’s great! Now, figure out what you think about it.  Actually, scratch that.  You don’t have to have a hard and fast opinion on somthing, but you do have to think about it.  Lord knows I am the poster child for figuring it out along the way.

For me, once I realized that I had a passion for Web 2.0 in the legal world, I decided to start blogging about it.  Blogging works well for me..it fit well with the rapidly changing landscape of the topic, it was something that I had engaged it previously on a personal level, and it allowed me – who was all by her lonesome in the middle of Kentucky – to share my ideas and my voice.

Depending on what your passion is, finding your voice may take the form of a scholarly article, or presentations, or becoming active organizationally or even just conversing on listservs.  However you do it, you have to believe that something to share. (I intially meant to call this point “Lose Your Fear”, but as you’ll see, I have a bit of a “Find” theme going here.)  So, propose presentations, submit article query letters, write a blog…swallow the “I’m not good enough” fears and put your name out there.   You don’t have to swing for the fences and do a heavily footnoted and researched LLJ article right out of the gate..try a regional or organizational newsletter.   Believe that you have something to say and say it.  This is also one of the reasons I love unconferences and my Lawberry Camp…they’re based on the belief that everyone’s experience is worthwhile and we can all learn from each other.  You don’t need a sage on the stage…everyone has something to teach others.

3. Find Your People

Speaking from experience, it’s really sucks when you find a topic that you’re fascinated by and want to talk all the time and no one wants to listen.  It makes you feel a little crazy.  Well, you know what?  You’re not crazy.  There are like-minded people out there.   You just have to find them.

For me, since I was interested in technological matters, I found my people online.  But, and this may be the case for you whether you look online or not, my people were initially not all law librarians – they were mostly in the non-law academic libraries. (And some of the people that I found online?  Were actually just across campus. ) Time progressed and I eventually found my Cool Kids, and now I have law librarians to talk about this stuff with, which makes me ridiculously happy.

Your People may not actually be individuals that you talk to all the time and become close friends with like I have.  Your People may be just an organization – either national or regional ones like AALL, SLA, or SEAALL, or subgroups within these.   Within the AALL framework, although I am an academic librarian and a member of ALL-SIS, that group just doesn’t light my fire.  I get much more geeked out when I’m talking to people and go to programs organized by RIPS.  So, play around….try different groups, read up on alternatives to what your doing now.

Granted, I traveled a Hell of a lot this past year and I will one day write a post on tips and tricks to professional development on the cheap. (I swear, it won’t all be hotel horror stories, but that”ll be a big part of it.)  But don’t feel like you can’t meet people or continue relationships because your travel budget got cut.   Thanks to this crazy modern world we live in, there are electronic means for this, and you don’t have to be on Facebook to take advantage of them. (Although that does help.)  And once you do find your people, the other stuff becomes easier too.  They’ll introduce you to new ideas and projects will spark between you.   And it all just keeps snowballing.

So, that’s how I’ve gotten where I am in the past three years.  I hope it doesn’t seem presumptious to write about this.

*Other alternative titles for this post: “How to Suceed in Librarianship Without Even Trying” (Not accurate. At all.) , “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Dossier” (Ditto), and “The P&T Hustle” (Probably would be a bad idea for myriad reasons.)  For more, see future blog post “How to Mangle Movie Titles for Fun and No Profit.”