Category Archives: search

Leaving the library

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As of next week, I won’t be working in the library organization of my company any more.  My team, which focuses on enterprise search and taxonomy, will move into a centralized IT organization.  I’ve known about this possibility for months and knew that it was a possibility when I took this job about a year ago.  Although I am proud to be a librarian, and will always be, I am actually glad of this change.  My hope is that with this move, we will finally have significant support and broader understanding of our roles and mission.  It didn’t have to be this way, of course.  One of the reasons I was interested in working in the library in the first place when I interviewed there 3 1/2 years ago was the fact that they “owned” enterprise search.  However, it has become clear that our group would have a better fit in the centralized IT organization, and that is what will happen.  It could be “from the frying pan into the fire” as we sometimes say, but at least it’ll be something different.  I will miss many friends as we move to a different building in a different campus of the company.

New job, new direction

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Monday afternoon I accepted an offer to take a job in a different group within the library where I work.  Basically what I’ll be doing is leading efforts to implement and expand search and taxonomy company-wide.  A lot of work has already been done so I’ll need to get up to speed quickly on that.  Also it is important to note that there is a whole team of people with whom I will be working on this large set of responsibilities.  I have always felt it was a huge plus that the library group in my large, global company has been given the responsibility for search and taxonomy.  That means that just about everywhere there is a search box on a page within our intranet or on external Internet sites, that is set up and maintained by the library.

This will probably be the most “un-library-like” job I have ever held. But I am ready for a new job and a new direction.  I will still be working within the library but the scope of the job is much broader than that.  One of the new things I’ll be doing is a lot of client development and managing client relationships as well as relationships with a new set of vendors.  There is much more to it and frankly I don’t understand it all just yet.  My official start date will by September 29 but I am already easing into the role and out of my existing one.  This means that the next several weeks will probably be pretty crazy.

Why the change?  Well, there are many reasons.  Mainly, I have been looking for a way to get to another level of responsibility and this provides that.  I have long wanted to try new things, to have a new set of challenges and learning opportunities.  There is no question in my mind that libraries and information centers of all stripes need to have a great awareness of and involvement in search, especially in this Google era when everyone thinks search should be as easy to use as Google and just about everyone uses Google many times a day.

It seems to me that a lot of people in my company aren’t happy with search as it currently is established, so I hope that along with many others, I can help to improve that.