As the semester winds down, I’ve found myself wanting to do a little bit of reflecting from all that has happened.

I went to an open access conference earlier this year put on by OU Libraries and then also to a Collections Care Conference put on by the Oklahoma History Center.  I learned a lot this year, and set very high goals for myself both personally and professionally.  Getting a full-time job in my field, running the “Tough Mudder” Race, and finishing the semester with A’s were three of my top goals that I focused on.  As you may know, I am in my final year of library school wrapping up my MLIS with a concentration in archives.  When I started library school I knew I wanted to use my degree to launch my career as an archivist or a digital asset manager in a library, museum, or archive.  I hadn’t thought much about the private sector at that point, but after taking some of the core courses in the OU School of Library and Information Sciences, namely “Management of Information and Organizations” with Dr. Connie Van Fleet and also Community Relations and Advocacy with Sarah Robbins this semester, I had a pretty good understanding of how similar these seemingly extremely different types of organizations could be.

I was getting excellent experience working for both a Congressional Archive handling traditional archival materials and also the Oklahoma History Center handling digital assets for a newspaper digitization project.  I found both jobs came with their frustrations, a fair amount of red tape, opportunities for improvement, but also unique opportunities to grow as an information professional–but it was time for something bigger.  I was beginning to get that itch that I wasn’t utilizing my skills to their full potential.

Coming from a psychology background, I’ve always been a fan of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the path towards self-actualization.  I wanted more.  I could feel myself being pushed by some unseen force towards my need to be everything that I could be.

I began my job hunt after being inspired by a fellow aspiring archivist who went after her goals and succeeded.  I’ve also been lucky enough to have a sort of mentor in this whole process who, very early on, gave me advice on how to proceed with gaining the “basket of skills” I needed to succeed and also on the realities of the job market.  So I applied for many positions, and if “digital asset management” was in the title I jumped at it, because those positions in the Midwest are far and few between.  I had some good interviews, some great ones, some just OK ones.  And then I had one where everything seemed to “click.”   I didn’t stress about hearing back about it, and a month later it happened very quickly.  I relocated my family three hours south to a whole new city and officially began my career as a practicing information professional.

After accepting this digital asset management position, I began to segue from the life of a traditional processing archivist and a digital projects archivist into corporate life.  I’ve found it to be challenging and extremely rewarding so far.  One of the best things is getting to problem-solve and help develop new workflows.  Most of all, getting to utilize my information background to help put together a more holistic “big picture” pertaining to processes and workflows is extremely rewarding which I suppose goes back to that feeling of “clicking” during the interview process.  It’s the right environment for me, the right people, the right opportunities and at the right time.

I knew my career path could take many different routes, because I’ve always had such a wide taste of interests–art museum archives, traditional librarianship, digital projects, designing workflows, collaborative projects, psychology, traditional manuscript processing, and of course collection care consulting.  But what has always grabbed my attention  is caring for image collections.

Finding a photograph while processing a folder in a traditional archival setting is always a bit exciting–finding out where it came from, describing the contents of the photograph, handling it maybe just a tiny bit more carefully than the manuscripts, and then separating it from the collection to go live with all the other photographs.  I think it is because we are such visual creatures.  So that, combined with a love for organization and a photo archivist is born.  I guess, it is difficult for me to part with the title “archivist.”

There are so many similarities between archives and digital asset management, and that’s because the underlying theory is the same.  In both you find the record’s life cycle continuum and in both you find the caring, selection, appraisal, curation, processing, and archiving of files.  That is not to say that there aren’t some major differences, but I think I will save that for another day.  No matter the job title, the organization, the types of materials, I will always be an information professional.  It is a nice feeling to have found your calling.