Introductions

This post inspired by Renee’s and Michelle and Lee’s posts.

Hi, I’m Con. It’s short for Constance. NB: I don’t like being called Connie.

I’m an academic librarian and I live in Perth, Western Australia. I’ve been working in university libraries since 2000, when I graduated from library school. I’m one of those weird librarians who’s only ever wanted to work in university libraries. Maybe a stint in a different sector would be good for me, but I’d have to give up my job to find out – and I enjoy it too much to want to do that.

I started out as a reference librarian, slowly worked my way up, and was all set in a role as an Associate University Librarian* with responsibility for the client services/front of house areas of the Library when the opportunity came up for me to switch portfolios about three years ago. This switch meant I became responsible for our acquisitions/subscriptions/systems areas – the back of house teams. I get to wrangle our collections budget and deal with library vendors and suppliers. This portfolio also includes building services to researchers at MPOW**, looking at Open Access, and copyright. And of course a huge part of this role – any management role, really – includes dealing with people – not just the vendors, but of course the staff members in my areas, and people from other areas of the University where I work. I’d say this is the most challenging, and the most rewarding, part of the job.

I’ve been blogging for a few years now, although the volume of posts here has diminished somewhat since Twitter and other outlets began taking up some of my attention. I started blogging a few years back when I needed to learn about “new technologies” for work. These days my focus is somewhat different, but I still happily learn about, and use whatever tools help me build connections and relationships with colleagues around the country and internationally. I also like writing and blogging, which is what keeps me keeping this blog up.

This blog’s never been a professional blog, as such, in that I don’t often write about work here. I think it’s been a combination of laziness (“I do this five days a week, I don’t wanna write about it any more”)and lack of confidence (“what have I got to say about this that’s going to be useful?”). Perhaps it’s time to remedy this.

* For those of you unfamiliar with this title, it means I’m the deputy/assistant to the Head or University Librarian. My current boss is fond of saying that his deputies are the most hardworking staff in the Library. I don’t correct him when he says this 😉

** MPOW stands for My Place Of Work. This very useful acronym was coined by Karen Schneider. (Apologies, I don’t have the link to the actual post discussing the term’s beginnings.)