Reinvention – Free Range Librarian Style

Haven’t had a reinvention post in a while. I was tickled to read about Karen Schneider’s new position with Equinox.

As of June 23 (just in time for ALA!), I’m the Community Librarian at Equinox, the support and development company for Evergreen, the premier, industrial-strength open-source integrated library system software.

What, you ask, is a Community Librarian? It’s a chief blogger, presenter, evangelist, community liaison, birds-of-a-feather organizer, strategist, branding specialist, user-experience person, project management advisor, and whatever else happens to need doing. (I wrote the job description, and I think that hits the high notes.)

After sixteen years in LibraryLand (more, if you count college and high-school jobs), I want to be working on the future of libraries. It’s time. For nearly two decades I’ve watched libraries struggle with closed legacy software, and the advantages of open source — particularly in a highly-scalable system — are obvious to me.

Making the advantages of open source obvious to YOU will be part of my job.

Congrats, Karen!

It does my heart good to see folks take on opportunities and challenges. Karen was instrumental in helping me decide to dive back into school for the doctorate. Now, I’m so excited to see Karen embark on this new path AND evangelize the advantages of OSS to libraryland.