2.0 titles
It’s interesting that recently I was reading some David Lee King archives about 2.0 sounding job titles. Although my job title hasn’t really changed (I still don’t know what it officially is, I just go with Faculty Librarian) it has opened to incorporate some other ideas. I am now some kind of Web Reference Librarian, or sometimes Web Resources Librarian, we can’t quite decide.
Basically this is a more official sounding way to keep doing what I already do: bombard my colleagues with “helpful” emails about tech things happening in the library world. I’m the one you can count on to say, “Hi. Can we have LibraryThing tags in the catalog?” and other such insanity. It’s something of a liaison role to the web and Millennium teams, which is fine because I spent quite a bit of time communing with those folks anyway.
My hope is that being in this intermediary role will allow the reference team to think really big about what they want out of our web presence. I hope for the various tech teams to be able to do really well what they already do really well: design, implement, deal with our inane nagging, and other such things. The bonus here is that each department should be able to go on speaking in nuanced and jargony language without having to translate for the benefit of the other. I already speak geek and librarian (well, on good days anyway, on less shiny days I just mumble incoherently).
Mostly, as I told my colleagues, I’m just making it up as I go along.