Hello, internet. I’ve missed you. Holy moly but it’s been a long time since I’ve had any kind of regular presence in blog-land. I’m not really sure how to account for that, other than to say that I’ve been busy. But aren’t we all?
I’m a little over a year into my job as the Web Services Librarian at Sonoma State and I’m happy to say that I still love it. It is hands down the most demanding, engaging job I’ve ever had. I don’t know that I’ve ever found myself bored at work, and I’ve never had a job about which I could say that. I might have shared that here before, but it still kind of amazes me. What it also means is that I’m actually mentally tired when I get home from work (in a good way), and I often feel like I don’t have a whole lot of energy for other things, like blogging or sewing or cooking. My work feels kind of all-consuming, again, in a good way.
So after one year in, what have I managed to accomplish? The biggest thing I did this year was to take stock of the existing SSU Library website and make some big changes to the underlying information architecture and content organization. I feel like this year was all about laying the foundation for the continued growth and increasing usefulness of the Library website.
I also took a seat on the University’s Academic Senate, participated in a couple of search committees, took on the role of marketing coordinator for the Library, and became the Library liaison to the Computer Science, Engineering, and Math departments. I’ll be teaching my first Engineering info lit class later this month, about which I’m both excited and nervous.
There are a lot of things that went into all the work I did last year that I really do want to write in more detail about. And I’m also excited about all the things that are coming up this year. The biggest thing is that the University is finally adopting a content management system for the web sites.
All of the campus sites are currently manually created and maintained with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We in the Library are also lucky enough to have access to a server with PHP and MySQL installed so we can do a few more slightly fancier things than other campus departments. It’ll be a huge leap forward for us to move to a CMS, and it also means there are some governance, infrastructure, and management things that need to be decided between the Library and IT. The Library has always had its own server infrastructure, and I’d really like to keep it that way so that we can continue to do the work we need to do without being tied to the timelines of the under-resourced campus IT department. So far it’s been a bigger diplomatic struggle than I anticipated, and I am definitely having to practice a lot of patience and compromise, which aren’t always my greatest strengths.
I’m also working to craft an effective content strategy for the Library website, which is tied to a bigger marketing strategy for the Library overall. I think we struggle sometimes with putting forward the right content at the right time for the right audiences. We just put ALL THE INFORMATION on the website without being strategic or thoughtful about how we’re crafting our messages. I will just say that changing this practice is going to be an uphill battle. It has proven really hard to make people understand the role of the website and the content we put up there. So I want to amass a lot of data and information to help me argue for the changes that I think we need to make.
And I really want to make it a regular practice to come back to writing in this space. I haven’t been writing very much at all, and I think it makes such a big difference in how I process and work through what I’m doing. I’d also really like to share some of the things I’ve learned so far, and the things I’m sure I’ll continue to learn. I feel like this past year has been a HUGE learning experience, although I can’t think of a single year in my life that hasn’t been.
And in non-work and non-Libary related things, this weekend is my husband’s and my first anniversary. It’s hard to believe it was only one year ago that our friends and family were descending on Oakland for what was the most fun party of my entire life. I almost wish we could do it all again.