Head, Digital Services and Technology Planning* at the University of California, San Diego Biomedical Library.

Apart from an unfortunate incident when I was a shelver in 1988 involving a 100-year old elevator and a 40-year old book truck (and a certain Fisheries Canada technical report that will never be seen again), my first *serious* shoving and making in libraries started in about 1994 when some friends and I shoved tables together in the basement of a library, “borrowed” computers and restrung phone lines from staff desks and made a little training room. We made a computer projector from a surplus-parts-store LCD panel (VGA, greyscale, needed all new connectors) and an ancient overhead projector. And we made weekend internet classes for progressive nonprofits in Toronto.

Today at my present job I manage the various web presences for Biomed, and oversee our Information Commons and “branch” IT support, along with doing reference and instruction. I am quite convinced I have the best job in the library. I’m surrounded by brilliant nice people all the time, I get to work at a variety of scales from the micro to the macro, and I don’t have to keep a budget. Awesome! Sometimes I’ve been a shover, a dragger, a maker, and a flim-flam man. I’ve been a twister of arms and poker of eyes and at other times a stroker of egos. Sometimes, well, I admit I’ve been the shovee.

I’m nominating myself for two things:
1. getting our Information Commons off the ground although the work on that goes back to about 2005. I think I’ve helped foster a spirit of yes that’s been part of our success. I’ve been able to find creative solutions and am unafraid to step in politics.
2. recognizing the water around me coming to a boil. I’m allegedly a web librarian and I recognize that my comfy little gig working in our CMS and all our easy-peasy 2.0 authoring environments is in some ways the pot of nice warm bath water that will eventually turn me and my skills into librarian soup. In our increasingly security-conscious environment, I’m not officially allowed to go beyond those tools. Frankly, I think it’s wrong that new grads 15 years behind me are more qualified to do my job than I am. I’ve still got another 20 years left to work and sorry, I ain’t shoving over. So I proposed and got funded to create a Web sandbox via a commercial web hosting service where I can learn what I need to learn about current web technology. I’ve had it for a year and I LOVE it.

You can find me most places as bmljenny

*Does that title sound familiar? If so, it’s because we shamelessly stole it from a recent job announcement from Texas.