Realia

The assignment for Thing 10 is to “tell us about why you joined the career, where you are now and how you got there and what you are planning to do next.”

I think that I covered the “how I got here and where I am now” pretty well in my very first post on this blog, so please go read that if you’re interested.

As far as what I’m planning to do next, well, who knows? I’m actually going through a pretty reflective period, career-wise, so this assignment is well-timed. I know that I don’t want to make a career move any time in the near future, but I’m at a spot where I’m starting to feel like I know what I’m doing at my current job, and so I’m starting to think just a little bit about what I want to do in the future and what I can be doing now to help facilitate those things, should I decide I want to make a change.

I’ve taken some online continuing education courses on things like taxonomy development and metadata. I think that eventually, I would like to move away from cataloging according to rules that are already set up and move toward work (perhaps on digital library projects) that involves starting from scratch with making decisions about how to organize a collection, setting up metadata schemes, and perhaps even creating original controlled vocabularies to describe a specialized set of items.

I’ve also taken on some work as an adjunct instructor for graduate library science classes through the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of Nebraska-Omaha. I really enjoy teaching, and sometimes I think about pursuing a career path that would allow me to do more of that.

But for now, I’m happy where I am, so I’m content to simply contemplate the future of my career.