I can name a whole bunch of people who deserve their own recognition for doing amazing work and influenced me in my short career so far. In fact, at the risk of coming across as all mushy, I think I’ll do that now!

While I was a grad student just trying to get my career kick-started in the right direction, Eva Davis (now director of Canton Public Library, MI) gave me my first professional work experience in public libraries at Ann Arbor District Library. Eva served as a mentor and supporter to me back then and continues to do so now. Other people at Ann Arbor who I respect and made a difference to me professionally (whether they realize it or not!) include Amy Cantu, Sherlonya Turner, Eli Neiburger, and the director, Josie Parker.

In my first full-time library job at Thousand Oaks Library (CA), my supervisor and adult services manager, Sue Pelman, provided me with an environment in which new ideas were encouraged. I also learned so much from colleagues like Margaret Douglas and Mohsen Rahnamaie.

When I moved back to the Chicago area and took a job at Skokie Public Library, I worked for another great boss (see a pattern here?) in Deborah Grodinsky, head of adult services. Deborah also gave me room to explore new ideas and interests, and taught me a lot about being a leader and supervisor. I also worked with a visionary director in Carolyn Anthony, who was actually the one who came up with the initial idea to create a digital media lab and paved the way for that entire project to become a reality! Of course, I need to mention people like Toby Greenwalt (started at Skokie on the same day and frequent collaborator on projects then and now) and Mick Jacobsen (countless ideas tossed back and forth while we carpooled to work and back, plus taking the Skokie DML to the next level), both of whom demonstrated on a daily basis how to be an  innovator and leader. People like Jennifer Phillips-Bacher, Ruth Sinker, Bruce Brigell, Adam Wisniewski, Christie Robinson, the entire IT staff…I can go on and on here…also deserved to be mentioned.

Now at Arlington Heights, I continue my lucky streak of working with smart, dedicated people who know libraries inside and out. My director, Paula Moore, and assistant director, Brian Shepard, showed me very early on that our library was willing to do whatever was necessary to innovate and remain relevant to our community. Our pilot digital Studio is just a small sampling of what’s to come and I can’t wait to be a part of it all! Working with colleagues from all over the library, including IT, Communications and Marketing, Programs, Customer Services, and, of course, Digital Services, make my days go by quickly because we’re so ambitious and excited about what we’re doing.

I haven’t even mentioned all the people I’ve met at conferences, on Twitter, at local networking groups and elsewhere who inspire me with the work they do for libraries and our communities. People like Ryann Uden, Bobbi Newman, Anne Slaughter, Mike Gershbein (yes, you too, Mike!), and countless others. Finally, I can’t forget mentioning the members of the RLA CE committee (mentioned in the LJ article). So many meetings packed with ideas about the state of libraries and what librarians need to learn more about in order to do their jobs!

I’m leaving out a lot of people, and I think the orchestra is about to play me off the stage, but if you’ve made it this far on this post, I’m sure you get the idea that I’ve been very fortunate to come across some incredible people since I decided to become a librarian back in 2004. Proof that this field is all about collaboration and sharing ideas!

So, here are the five projects that brought challenges, excitement, fun, and exhaustion to my work life since November:

• Mobile app: This is a project I started a few months before my new position began, but our target launch date was the end of December so I spent a lot of time on this towards the end of the year. We worked with Boopsie to develop the app and I think it turned out well, even if there are a few things we need to improve sooner rather than later. The app does a lot of things, but I’m sure the most commonly used feature will be the ability to log in to your personal account to place holds and renew items. The app’s so-called “killer feature” is the ability for people to check out materials from their own phone/tablet using their camera as a scanner or by punching in barcodes manually. My work on this project involved figuring out the content, the menu structure, working with our graphic designer, and going back-and-forth with my contacts at Boopsie to make sure the app worked the way we needed it to. Working with a vendor on a project can save you time in some ways, but it can also be very time consuming when there’s any customization happening.
• New web catalog: My library recently began using SOPAC, an open source Drupal module, for our web catalog interface. Several of my colleagues began this project awhile ago, but I was asked to take the lead soon after my new position was created. The biggest challenge for me on this project was to get up-to-speed on all the development and decision-making that occurred before I got involved, and to figure out how and where I could make a positive impact. I tried focusing my efforts on prioritizing the remaining issues/fixes and identifying last-minute improvements to improve the design and usability of the catalog. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been and I’m sure there were times when I slowed things down, but I think we’re getting there! We have thousands of users who have switched over to the new account system and are using the new catalog regularly, but it’s hard to hear anything but the small number of complaints and negative comments we get from the public and staff. It’s all feedback, though, and feedback can only help us improve things moving forward. Sidenote: I have even more respect for the expertise of our catalogers now that I see all the ways their daily work with our catalog records impacts the user’s end-experience.
• Pilot digital media lab: One of the highlights of my short career so far had been creating the Digital Media Lab at Skokie Public Library, so when I came over to Arlington Heights I was hoping to one day have the opportunity to create a similar space. Luckily, the executive management team at my library see eye-to-eye with me on this and we now have a pilot digital media lab open to the public. We have not publicized the space much since we’re not ready to staff it the way we want, but we’re planning a big publicity push at the end of February. Besides helping to figure out what equipment and software should go into the Studio, much of my time on this project is spent on staff training. We have a great group of computer assistants that are very tech-savvy, but every one of them still benefited from workshops on iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork led by a local trainer. Next week, we have 2-hour one-on-one sessions scheduled to help staff understand the basics of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. We also use Lynda.com extensively. To help the rest of the staff understand what we’re trying to do with these new services, our Digital Services staff hosted an open house, where we provided demos, talked about what people might want to work on in the lab, and, of course, offered refreshments. It was a great way to get buy-in from across the library and get people talking to customers about the new services.
• Evaluating the website: My new position places me in charge of the library’s website in terms of content, design, and usability, so in the past three months, I started ongoing conversations with colleagues about the state of our website and where we’re going with it in the next year or so. I had some familiarity with Drupal from a few years ago, but I needed to get a lot more comfortable with it in a hurry so I attended a “Drupal in a Day” workshop in December and also attended the Chicago Drupal Camp. I’m also figuring out workflows between myself and several colleagues who I will be working with frequently on web stuff. The new catalog took up most of my time thinking about the website, so I’m still in the process of figuring out what needs to be done with the website and how to plan my work out. I have to say that the recent ALA Techsource webinar, “10 Steps to a User-Friendly Website,” led by Aaron Schmidt and Amanda Etches-Johnson gave me a lot of ideas!
• Organizational Realignment: Besides the creation of my new position and department, Digital Services, there were significant changes made to other departments to help position the library as we offer new services and tweak how we offer current ones. This meant different things to different staff, but for me it meant helping to create the vision for the new Digital Services group and the new Customer Services group, which partly consists of my former department, Information Services (still with me?). Lots of meetings (the good, productive kind mostly!) to discuss the needs of our community, our services, staffing, communication, timelines, space use, and the future of the library.

So, those are some of the highlights from my first three months on the new job. It’s been a whirlwind, but one that I think my colleagues and I are coming out of intact! I’ll try to write more later this week with some details about what’s in store for us this year.