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New job, Community Librarian, Equinox, Woohoo!

A quick lunchtime post (written in the wee hours, embargoed until now) since I’ve received email that tells me the press release is filtering out across the Internet’s series of tubes…

First, I’m going to miss My (Current) Place Of Work. They are great folks and when I said I was leaving they expressed great sorrow and sent some VERY funny pictures.

100_3090 But I had an offer I couldn’t refuse — well, I could have refused, but then I’d be kicking myself for the rest of my life, and what fun would THAT be? (Like this cupcake I ate in New York City last December. Sure, diets, whatever… but I’m still glad I ate the cupcake.)

As of June 23 (just in time for ALA!), I’m the Community Librarian at Equinox, the support and development company for Evergreen, the premier, industrial-strength open-source integrated library system software.

What, you ask, is a Community Librarian? It’s a chief blogger, presenter, evangelist, community liaison, birds-of-a-feather organizer, strategist, branding specialist, user-experience person, project management advisor, and whatever else happens to need doing. (I wrote the job description, and I think that hits the high notes.)

After sixteen years in LibraryLand (more, if you count college and high-school jobs), I want to be working on the future of libraries. It’s time. For nearly two decades I’ve watched libraries struggle with closed legacy software, and the advantages of open source — particularly in a highly-scalable system — are obvious to me.

Making the advantages of open source obvious to YOU will be part of my job.

Where will I work?

I don’t like to say “from home” — that sounds too parked-in-a-chair — I think a better term is “telework,” because first, our home will probably change sometime in the next year, and second, the point is that I’ll be wherever Evergreen and Equinox need my voice and presence. I will make trips throughout Georgia and to the Norcross offices of Equinox (I’m starting to like Atlanta — it’s an interesting city) and far, far beyond.

I’m sad to leave MPOW… learned a lot, great people; definitely recommend MPOW to anyone interested — but I’m excited about the future. (I hope that was a nice-enough farewell to my buddies at MPOW. I’m hoping they give me a green Prius as a going-away present… though that means I better finish that Shibboleth report Greg is waiting for..!)

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This was written by K.G. Schneider. Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008, at 12:45 pm. Filed under Librarian Wisdom, Life, Next Gen Catalog. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.