Small news

When I first talked to my wonderful current boss about applying for a different job, she took a look at the job description, nodded, said she'd be happy to write a recommendation, which she did, wonderfully.

Now another job opportunity has come my way. I went through the same thing, told her about it, asked what she thought, and she got really bummed. Paraphrasing, "I thought you'd go to the interview of that first job and say 'forget it.' The job description showed nothing promising. This position is worth applying for, and taking if it is offered to you." So she will give me the recommendation, and it will be a good one, and she will keep me without reservation if I don't get the job, but she is bummed.

So yeah, I'm applying for a job that looks really good. I didn't set out to do all this, I just needed something to give me a fresh perspective on my own job, which is great but pays poorly and is tiresome and repetative. I think this second job is much more of a reach and I am much less likely to be a super-strong candidate, though I think I'll make candidate status.

As I told my reference writers, I've never applied for a professional position before, so I consider these excercises in that - part of my grad school education.

Other small news - I'll be giving two talks at NHEMA later this spring. My wonderful boss is organizing the conference, so there's that. But there's also something I am still coming to terms with: in comparison to a lot of library folks, I am very techy and cutting-edge. If I compare myself to librarians online, I am ten steps behind. But the people I give the talks to are comparing themselves to me - and I am 20 steps ahead. It's all very weird to me, but since a lot of the stuff I talk to my cool boss about is new to her - and she is smart and in general keeps up with stuff - that makes me sure I have things to share with all these other school librarians. One talk is on digital audiobooks, the other is more generally on "Library 2.0" (gasp! I used that buzzy term! I didn't on the conference thingy though - I entitled my talk, "Keepin' Up With The Kids: The interactive web and how it can work with and for school libraries and their librarians.") So blogging, but also rss feeds and aggregators, social software spaces like LJ and myspace, flickr and other photosharing spaces, and so on and so on. You get the idea.