former librarians...what do you do now?

This post was in-part triggered by the "what do librarians do?" thread, by my own experiences at work over the past month or so, and by research I've done into career choices of library-school graduates. (Answers here are not for research, just to satisfy my curiosity.) So, for those of you who at one point were librarians or earned an MLS, MLIS, etc., but are no longer librarians, what do you do now?

I am a recent MSLS graduate, and I have worked as a solo librarian. I began a non-traditional position in truth because I couldn't find a library job to fit my very specific geographic limitations in a reasonable timeline. I have a background in pharmaceuticals, and I took a regulatory affairs job. I don't consider myself to be a librarian there, not even a special librarian, but I do use my so-called "LIS skills." Answering many of the questions I receive is certainly "reference," and I've been asked to create a digital library for the department. The manager even wants me to "catalog" (her words) some of our information and to give some tips on personal information management to the staff. Recognition is not complete, however; I will not be doing any medical literature searching, with or without physician review. I plan to become involved in the Drug Information Association and keep up with developments in controlled vocabularies and data exchange formats. Perhaps one day I will return to libraries, but I feel like this is a natural development and way for me to grow and contribute that "fits" right now in my life.

I wonder if other "former librarians" (here because some ties still bind) might share what they do now and their experiences in communicating (and demonstrating!) to others the relevance of their library education and experience. Information management has value in any context, yet despite sometimes overly eager claims to the contrary librarians do not have a monopoly on these skills. When I talk about databases and systems analysis and XML, coworker eyes glitter with approval; "more efficient flow of information" generates a quizzical, but interested look. When I mention my master's in library science, I get a "that's interesting" at best and a chuckled "really?" from more than a few. I have taken adding "specializing in management of scientific information" to successfully soften the blow. It is not uncommon for people to enter my role with diverse educational backgrounds, so it's not just a scientist/non-scientist thing.

Yes, I know the L word has long generated controversy among educators and associations, particularly in SLA. There is a political element, too. Not a few librarians express hostility to anything for-profit, and that can color perception by outsiders of what might be taught in library school. I am proud that I am part of a process that brings drugs to market and monitors their quality and safety. I don't need to be paid by the government to serve the public good, and my abilities apply in either context. In my ideal world, businesspeople would recognize the value and important skills of librarians, and vice/versa.

Enough about me! Would anyone else like to share?

I'm not (yet) a former librarian, but might be one soon as I plan to get into academia.

I'm currently working in an academic library in South Africa. Unfortunately, we are not given much opportunity to research. As I'd like to do more the only option would be to become an academic. Another up-side is that the pay is better as an academic, unlike just about any other profession out there.

My post-library career has been rather winding, I'm afraid. My exodus from the library was being assigned to manage a corporate website in the early 1990's when librarians were pretty much the only people who knew much about the web. As the web became popular, my standing as a former webmaster of a top-25 website opened up new opportunities.

In the late 1990's, I was hired to design and manage an "enterprise-scale, information and taxonomy management system to collect, evaluate, organize, and distribute information produced through the company to employees, partners, and customers through web and other electronic means" for a major Silicon Valley company--which, when you think about it sounds an awful lot like building a library. However, DDC and LCCN don't really work for classifying marketing brochures and manufacturing procedure in a way that is useful to corporate end users and standard usability techniques like card sorting which I had used quite successfully on customer sites did not work well for organizing Intranet information. Taking a page from Ranganathan, I developed a faceted classification system based around the concept that answers to information need to be organized based on the information that users know about the information they need: a pre-sales customer knows about his needs, but not our brand structure; another customer may have one of our products and know the brand, but not what type of device we consider it. Both may need the same information, but the access points have to be different.

Having a reasonable and user-tested taxonomy system is all fine and good, but how do you manage such a taxonomy, particularly in a dynamic business environment, where the classification process has to be deeply integrated with business workflows, manage large scale product development projects, and be able to dynamically present different websites with loosely related navigation systems (plus looks/feels) to different audiences in a way that satisfies Marketing's whims. The answer, less obvious in the 1990's, was a semantically denominated ontology system (similar to what eventually became RDF/OWL/SKOS).

In that timeframe, you couldn't just walk up to a developer and tell them, "I need a system that can manage an asymmetric faceted navigation system based on semantic triples." They would look at you kind of funny. Some still do. You have to write requirements, which when developers don't think that something is really possible gets really down and dirty into logical data modeling , system external specifications, and so forth.

I ended up with a good system. We won a bunch of IT industry awards, etc. I managed build-out of the system and was happily getting back into the information world. But when you are good at specifying requirements, you get tapped for doing other projects and labeled "Business Analyst" and thrown into IT.

After a few years in IT, the company I worked for was downsizing and we had the "privilege" of going through an "apply for your own job" exercise where we had to put together resumes and reapply for the reduced number of positions that would be in the new organization. As a result, because I more in touch with actual business information than a typical BA and was also more adept at data modeling than the typical BA, I was actually reclassified as an "Enterprise IT Architect."

Enterprise IT Architects are generally expected to be in-touch with everything IT related. While I trained other architects on unstructured data, ECM systems, and taxonomy, I was cross-trained on SAP, data governance, and data quality, and generally hard-core DBA stuff.

The question of "What am I really?" has come up because the F-100 company that I have been working for is in the process of becoming just an F(ormer) company through bankruptcy and I have had to go into the open job market. I accepted a new position tonight. I am not sure what the title is, but I am not sure that I haven't returned full-circle and become a Librarian again.

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Thanks for sharing, and I hope it works out well for you.