I don’t think I ever officially announced on here that I had sold my house just north of Pittsburgh, bought a 120-year-old house in Maine, and started a fully-remote library job (truly, a unicorn of a thing in this field) over the course of just a little over two months at the beginning of this year. I had, I think, accepted the job offer when I wrote my new years post in December, but because I had not yet given notice to EvilCorp, the best I could do without being rude was to vaguely gesture in the direction of “big changes.” (Is it rude to refer to them as EvilCorp? Maybe, but I also think it’s rude to focus on profits when you provide healthcare.)
Anyway, I moved with the cockatiels in mid-February and started my job as the Library Web Services Developer for Bowdoin College Library on March 1, working remotely from a couple of towns over from the college (since PA’s tax laws are more ridiculous than Bowdoin’s payroll office could handle, and there were good reasons not to move to each of the other states they allowed, Maine seemed like a good choice). The job is really good, doing a lot of the same work I did for the University of Alaska Anchorage, which was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. (Booz Allen Hamilton was the most professional environment and the one where I was treated best; CCAC was the one where I felt like I made the most difference in my day-to-day work; and UAA was the one that best fit my particular work style and brain configuration.) It’s a job that pays money, so of course there are challenges, and as the only entirely remote person at the library and one of few at the College, I often feel like I am trying to find my way around the organization and build relationships on hard mode. I don’t mean to complain, just to acknowledge that being one of the odd ones out can be hard. However, since I am still forced to live the 2020 lifestyle for the foreseeable future, I am incredibly grateful for the ability to work remotely and for each step the library takes toward inclusiveness for its remote, hybrid, branch, and off-hours employees. We’re all learning, so it’s cool. Plus, the folks at Bowdoin are overwhelmingly kind, and a willingness to give each other the benefit of the doubt makes everything go more smoothly.
Now, since I’ve started this job, we have migrated our integrated library system and catalog — the switchover happened in late June and was (is) as smooth as an ILS change can be. We’ve also had a director retire, and our new director started last week. The college has had a president retire and a new president start, with her inauguration coming up soon. My manager is brand new to my team, though she’s been with the library for a long time and has managed Technical Services and (still manages, alongside us) Special Collections & Archives. So I haven’t really seen what the library’s, or even the college’s, “normal” will look like, and probably won’t for another six months or more. And to be fair, I am still exhausted from moving, starting a third new job in two years, being declared expendable during an ongoing pandemic, and :gestures around at wildfires, mass shootings, wars, changing climate, etc.: you know, things. So they haven’t seen me at my best, yet, either.
I did already create a committee, though, heh—a more formal decision-making body for website stuff, so that we can make bigger changes than any one person or group was previously empowered to make. And I got to tell the whole staff at a very high level how the web presence works and what my job is. I taught some Excel workshops. I rebuilt the searchbars for the front page (part of the image at the top of this post) and for everybody’s LibGuides, to help out with the catalog change. I designed a pretty great wordmark, which for (understandable) political reasons had to be replaced. (So if anyone names anything “Compass,” be sure to hit me up.) I joined the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Working Group for the library, the Accessibility Task Force for the college, and probably a couple of other groups that aren’t coming to mind right now. I customized our catalog and the Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin shared union catalog with some very nice HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I wrote some Python to overwrite some Perl scripts, with the goal of phasing them out, and made the necessary changes in LibGuides to go along with that. (I love deleting code. Though it may be another year before I get to delete the last of this code.) I got us to upgrade from LibGuides to LibGuides CMS and worked with Springshare to get all of our guides sorted into groups. And just yesterday I wrote some probably horrible, but also very effective, jQuery to solve a longstanding problem with our LibCal implementation. Plus more than a thousand little edits all over our three CMSs over my almost 5 month tenure. So, I mean, “not my best” really isn’t that bad, all things considered.
This is part of a series of posts where I will try to write about just one topic, in hopes of decreasing the barrier to entry on post-writing, making each individual post faster to read and easier to digest, and publishing a bit more often. Let’s see how it goes. 😉
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