What Do You Do (for a living)?

When people have asked me this question over the past couple of years, I have really hesitated. A couple of jobs ago, it didn't seem to be a problem - I tried to disassociate myself somewhat from the library world, and only brought that part back into the context after calling myself a Content and Communications Manager. Then with addition of a short stint of academic library experience under my belt, and now a title that actually has the word "librarian" in it even though the company does not have a library, I've been struggling somewhat.

Recently I took to calling myself a Digital Librarian, and I've now decided it fits. Not only does it fit, but it seems to capture people's imaginations. Most still consider librarians to be people who love and deal with books, and some have expressed to me that being a librarian is their fantasy career, as if it's unachievable in some way. But when I preface Librarian with Digital, well, that sweeps it right into the present age. They get it. I deal with information on the Web, computer, etc., however they frame it. Wow, cool. So interesting.

I'm a little concerned that some may view even this title as more narrowly sliced than what I actually do, so I'm usually sure, if I have the opportunity, to add that I deal with both the finding/retrieval and the organization/categorization/display aspects. I need to know where and how to find information (and thus its nature) and where and how to "put it away" so that it can be easily found and referred to again. Whether it's called information, content, or data, this description seems to resonate with just about everyone.

SubjectsPlus

My manager, who is not a librarian, pointed out SubjectsPlus and some of its implementations to me. All of them were academic libraries with lots of resources. We are a corporate information center with very few resources, although SubjectsPlus could possibly work for us. My manager's apparent fascination with it intrigued me and emphasized the differences in our points of view. While I don't disagree with him in this instance, the memory of my academic experience came crashing back. There we tried like crazy to make information display simpler. Here we are referring to providing more information in various ways. We are working hard to prove value; making display simple and easy is still important but nevertheless secondary. What an interesting contrast.