Sara Mooney

Do You Love It?

That, my friend is a very loaded question.

As with any job, there are great things about it and it also has its pitfalls. As I’m coming to the close of my contract, it’s hard to believe a number of things:

• That 2.5 years have already passed. o_O
• That I’m facing unemployment for the first time in my career.
• That (in some respects) I’m at the bottom of the pecking order being a fresh MLIS grad.
• I really am not ready to leave Las Vegas.

That last one really surprised me. When I accepted my current job, I looked at it as a way to escape Florida (check!), complete my degree (check!), and gain some experience (check!). I didn’t expect to stay in Vegas much beyond that time. In these past few years, I met a bunch of great people here through social media and events. The tech industry is growing here with many companies becoming leaders in interactive marketing and figuring out how to measure the effectiveness (really — the metrics are the most interesting part to me). I would love to see this area develop into the Silicon Desert, but without the high cost of living.

As I wrote before, I am extremely interested in metadata. What’s nice is that I have training and background in schemas and crosswalks, so there’s a solid foundation to build on as the study progresses. The most interesting thing is that librarians have been talking metadata for over 10 years, and the rest of the IT / marketing world now notices it. Yep. Good metadata makes all the difference for finding items in this digital world. It will be great to see what insights these areas provide to the development of metadata standards. What concerns me, though, is that the IT / marketing may go a completely separate way and create even more crosswalk problems. Or not create standards at all, which creates a fun interoperability spiderweb to untangle.

Mind you, these are all what-if’s and completely speculative, not based on any facts. Metadata is still a young field of study, and there are times where I read, read, and read and still can’t keep up with all of the developments.

Getting back to if I love it…

I love the people. I love the challenges of organization. I love the metadata extraction and creation. I love the taxonomy. I like that the work gives me the ability to think abstractly.

I dislike chasing people for information. I dislike dealing with the emails. I dislike the flow of communication (or lack thereof) on occasions. I’m not sure I 100% like the direction the company as a whole is headed, but only time will tell the final tale.

The good days still outweigh the bad. I’ve been lucky. The job came around shortly after starting my MLIS, which gave me real work experience and a different perspective on librarianship from many of my classmates and even some of my professors. And the MLIS gives me a different perspective of my job and skill set from my colleagues.

In some ways, I’m not ready to move on because my current job still provides me with challenges. In other ways, I’m ready to move on because I don’t know how much more I’ll be able to learn about metadata doing my current job.

Here lay the crossroads. Which way to go?