I’ve been wanting to blog about this for a while…

I got a job. 🙂

I was offered the position about 11 days ago, but was nervous about blogging about something that was not yet in writing. After having lunch yesterday with the Library Director and her husband, I realized that yes, I really do have a job and I probably wouldn’t be jinxing myself by writing about it. And since we just put an offer in on a house, our first, I guess all of this is all pretty real and won’t dematerialize (though the house might).

So I’m going to be a Distance Learning Librarian in the great state of Vermont. If I could have described my dream position when I first started applying for jobs, it would be “distance learning librarian”, but I held out little hope of finding such a position, as rare as they are these days. And after interviewing for jobs in places that would have required a lot of compromise, my husband and I are ending up in the exact sort of place we’d always wanted to live. Quiet. Small town. Friendly people. Lots of scenic beauty and places to get out into nature. And only 45 minutes from a Banana Republic (hey a girl’s gotta live)! Better yet, I’m only a 30 minute drive from one of the coolest librarians and coolest couple I’ve met in a long time. And my colleagues are just amazing. I’ve never met a nicer bunch of people in my life, and I can’t believe my good fortune to have a job I know will offer me plenty of opportunities to make a difference.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m pretty sure that my blogging activities helped me get the job, or at least the interview. If I’d not had a blog, I would just have been another new librarian with a bit of library experience and not enough of a resume to prove her worth. With my blog, I was a person who is genuinely passionate about the profession and interested in sharing ideas and making libraries better. Because I wanted to create useful content for my blog, I tried out new software offerings and got into screencasting, something I’ll probably be doing a lot of in this position. Blogging, I think, took me out of the anonymous crowd of new librarians and made me a known entity. I know it could have hurt as much as it could have helped — I can be a bit opinionated — but I doubt I’d have wanted to work at a place that thought of my blogging as a bad thing. Blogging has made me more passionate about librarianship than my year and a half in library school ever did. It’s helped me to meet some amazing people in the profession who inspire me every day. People can go on and on about the “objective” worth of blogs, but for me, they have opened up a new world.

So I’m excited to go to the ALA Conference as a Librarian. I guess I’ve been a librarian since the day I graduated with my MLIS, but now I have the opportunity to really get things done, rather than just talking about them.

Life is good.