Since July, I’ve been sharing an office. I thought I would absolutely hate it, but it turns out that it’s been terrific. Sharing an office with the right person can lead to increased creativity (if perhaps slightly decreased productivity), and that’s exactly what I’ve found since I started sharing an office with Josh Petrusa. Josh is our Electronic Resources Librarian who started working at Norwich in July straight out of library school at UIUC. The thing I like most about Josh is his energy; he’s positive, full of new ideas, and isn’t the least bit jaded. Kind of like me when I started at Norwich two years ago. Nice to have two of us now. We’ve been working on some neat projects over the past 2 1/2 months and I can’t tell you how nice it is to work out my half-baked ideas with someone else who understands. He’s been such an asset at our little library.

Well, one can’t share an office with me for long without getting the blogging itch, so Josh applied for one of the first-year librarian positions on ACRLog. And, of course, he was accepted. Josh’s first post came out today. I think his first-year posts will be really interesting as people in a small library are often responsible for so many diverse responsibilities. Josh may be the E-Resources Librarian, but he’s also the liaison to Humanities, he teaches information literacy classes, he works at the reference desk, and soon (yay!) he will be my backup on a lot of the tech stuff. So it should be interesting to see how he manages to juggle it all.

Josh and I will also be giving a talk together at Internet Librarian, filling the considerable shoes of Roy Tennant. We’ll be speaking on the topic of User-Generated Content on Monday at 4:15 pm. I kind of pushed Josh into it, but I knew that he wanted to speak eventually. I’d planned on not doing any speaking or professional writing until I’d been in my job a year, but like Josh, I got gently pushed into it by people who knew that I could do it. I’m glad I could pay it forward. 🙂

So keep an eye on Josh. He’s a rising star!