Last Friday marked my last day at the University of Toronto’s Map & Data Library, my second home for the last decade. I am delighted and honoured to announce that I’m the new Digital Repositories Librarian at the University of Waterloo, beginning July 9. I’m taking two weeks off to explore various places in southern Ontario by bike and by car, and hope to see my first oriole.
I am lucky as hell to have landed a full-time indefinite-term job within two hours of my home, though I know I was a top-notch candidate who brought a decade of relevant work and interest to the interview process. I couldn’t help but think through this entire process: what about the hundreds of MLIS graduates from UofT’s iSchool each year who don’t have ten years of academic library experience under their belt? My unpopular opinion: close down library schools, architecture schools, and most other professional faculties until there are legitimate labour shortages.
Before I received the topic for my candidate presentation, I hoped to run a free-form lecture about the most important lessons I have learned about library and archival work, and only mention QTBIPOC folks. It would have been incredibly hard to put that into 20 minutes, because there are so many who have framed the work I am bringing to digital repository work and scholarly communications. I was asked to present on my digital repository outreach strategy, which was a respectful, relevant, and totally doable question for a candidate to handle, but I noticed that by the end of the day, I was referring to the work of all the same people I wanted to talk about. I am going to get around to uploading my talk and slides here soon.
I am now, almost by accident, a scholarly communications librarian, and now I commit myself to helping develop technological approaches to “various shades of open”. If I trust my instincts and be kind I will do just fine.