The open house today was sparsely attended, but I honestly didn’t mind; I got plenty of mileage out of being able to sit people down and treat them as captive audiences for a bit.
Home run of the day: having an engineering professor tell me to “talk to the dean.” Oh, yeah, loved that. I can’t just waltz unheralded into a dean’s office, but I have no trouble at all with telling one, “Dr. John Doe, whom I spoke with at the open house, suggested that I contact you…”
The curious thing was that nobody seemed interested in the repository to start with, but as soon as I explained it, eyes widened and jaws dropped and “Hey, that’s really cool!”-s were uttered.
Well, yes. I like what I do, and I think it’s pretty cool.
From a career perspective, taking this job was something of a risk. Academic libraries are going to need reference librarians as long as I live; if you land a ref-lib position, you can expect to keep it barring budgetary disaster or complete on-the-job meltdown.
I, on the other hand, am explicitly associated with a project—a new one, at that—and projects can and do fail. There’s even an obvious backup plan for MPOW if they decided to kill the repository—dump everything into the consortial repository. I’ve been aware of this from day one, and even though I’m a compulsive worrywart, I’m actually fairly sanguine about it.
It does help, though, when the Big Boss points out that a proposed initiative involving the repository is “a permanent thing, not something we can back away from.” Nothing like a little indispensability to brighten up your day.
