This was a comment elsewhere but I thought I might add it here as it’s a little bit meta and a little bit where I’m at.

Where are we now? Some folk in the community are hitting a peak and I seem to be heading toward a trough, perhaps I am old…I am a decade or two older than quite a few that I am chatting to on twitter these days. I remember my uni days which stretched on forever…yes I was at uni for a decade or so. Every year or two, I needed to make new groups of friends to ensure I continued to have friends as others continued to graduate. I did finish eventually with a BA (Philosophy, History & Philosophy of Science) [and an unofficial major in Computer Science and a Master’s in Librarianship. So nerr…I finished and people didn’t really expect me to finish…professional student, years on the dole…yet here I am…a senior librarian at one of the top libraries in the country.

I am not a manager, I have no staff reporting to me. Somehow I keep finding interesting projects in odd nooks and crannies. Imbuing whatever job I’m doing with some extension of who I am. Allegedly, my primary role is to look after eresources, manage contracts and budgets, deal with suppliers…and stats for usage…always stats. Yet somehow I keep squeezing a little bit of me in…I do more tech stuff than most, I have managed to grab some tech support into my role…tech support seems to be a natural home of sorts.

However, I manage to pull in other things..some years ago I was tasked with implementing a strategy to harvest web sites, which I did. I have, via my employer, been capturing  NSW government websites for several years. That’s several terabytes of data now and I continue to experiment with tools for exploring that content and looking at ways for making it publicly available. I’ve recently taken over the Library’s capturing of social media…so I’ve set up a working group to take some of the weight. Meanwhile I’m exploring policy and looking at what’s possible with other platforms.

I can see the shape of me developing…I turn 50 this year and am happy to say that I keep seeing endless possibilities, so many directions to head, so many things to try. At 50 I want to work forever, actually I think the government wants me to work forever too. However right now, I don’t want to stop. I want to keep pushing. I want to keep doing.

At 50 I have more hope than I did at 20. My horizon is larger.

Hmmm…this post has not been a regurgitation of my comments elsewhere…I might have to squeeze them in another day, or not, and continue ever on.