During last summer’s  SLA Conference a colleague of mine summed up how most people become librarians. “We never expect to become one,” he said “but somehow we all end out scanning books anyway.” Ok, he didn’t exactly say that but his point was more or less the same – few people plan on the profession becoming their life’s work. I certainly didn’t. And, I’m not sure it’ll be my “legacy” either.

In 2006, I fully expected to go to graduate school. I was going to get my Ph.D, and I was going specialize in Intellectual History. My parents still thought I’d end out going to Law School. I argue like a lawyer anyway…

To make a long story short, nobody in my family knew the first thing about the college admissions process – I’m only a second generation graduate – and my application packets weren’t great to begin with. Realistic about the schools I had gotten into, which still wern’t bad,  I took a chance in St. Louis with a internship at the Missouri Historical Society, packed up, and moved from Springfield.

Just before leaving, I applied to the University of Missouri’s School of Information Science and Learning Technology. As it turned out, while writing my senior thesis one of Drury’s Librarians had suggested Library Science as a career avenue. She assuredly said that I could find work after graduating.  By 2007 my internship had ended and my boss was offering me a job working on Congressman Dick Gephardt’s Congressional Papers. The advice was paying off, and the rest, as they say, is history. I worked a few library jobs. I moved to Columbia when the Gephardt Papers Project ended. And, I graduated just in time for the “Great Recession.”

Uhoh.

After several months of searching, by chance, a former Professor mentioned that the Missouri Department of Transportation was looking for a librarian. I applied and was hired.

I have to admit that I’m a bit of a pragmatist. Vague or trendy topics rarely command my attention and “knowledge management” is one such thing. Anyway, last week I had a chance to see a few knowledge maps – they are essentially visualizations of communication practices – and I realized just how useful that can be. Most procedures at work are pretty difficult to follow, so I think I’m going to do the unthinkable. I’m going to concede that I’ve been wrong.

Sometime in the next couple of months I’m going to send out a survey to identify communication patterns between researchers and practicing engineers. Hopefully, the resulting data will make it easier to see just what I need to do to get information to the ground level. Expect a follow up post sometime in the future. Of course, I’m also wondering if there are any other practices I can implement…

Late yesterday, I found out that my professional organization’s membership – the Special Library Association – voted down it’s name change proposal. The reasons were fairly obvious. While a most members think that we need to branch out to other disciplines (which we do) the alternative name, well, sucked. The Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals just didn’t strike a chord. Neither did it’s acronym of ASKPro.

You would think, then, that the leadership would tread more carefully when posting news to the internet on the topic but this hasn’t been the case. An already oft-quoted blurb from the SLA website reads, “voting in record numbers, SLA members failed to approve a proposal to change the organization’s name to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals.” Note the word failed. While I will admit that I did vote for the name change I’m a little relieved that it didn’t go through. Most importantly, it’s also worth pointing out that the real failure here wasn’t on the part of SLA’s membership. It was on the part of name change proponents to find an adequate replacement.