The Early Years
Graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, I faced a situation familiar to many of those with a new liberal arts degree: unemployment. Moving to Chicago, I fell back on my experience as a student library clerk, landing a job at the John Marshall Law School.
After a year in Chicago and another year managing a bookstore in Ridgefield, CT, I moved to Los Angeles. I worked at the Rand Corporation, where I cataloged Soviet newspapers, NTIS documents, and other esoterica. I got into computers, learning UNIX and exploring Gopher. I installed the Mosaic browser when it came out and mucked around with the NCSA web server. I went to graduate school at UCLA and received a Masters degree in Library and Information Science.
I came to Washington, D.C. in the late nineties. The first few years I worked for a government contractor in Maryland, a law firm (Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering), and then as the National Technical Coordinator for the Libraries of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which is the longest job title I've ever had. Then I landed The Big Job.
The IMF
I was hired by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a librarian (grade 10) in 2000. I did system administration and technical support, then marketing and training. I taught database search techniques to IMF and World Bank staff, helped devise marketing campaigns and organized training events. Eventually I was selected to lead the library's training team.
In December 2005, I did a presentation on web searching. Over 120 people showed up to a room set up for 50. There was a line out the door and people stood in back or sat on the floor. I spent an hour showing people advanced search techniques in Google, Yahoo, Clusty, A9, Ask, and Wikipedia.
The next year, I presented a series of classes in the IMF, the World Bank, and the IFC to train staff how to read RSS feeds using Bloglines. I also launched the first internal blog in the IMF. This lead to setting up blogs for other departments and teaching staff how to blog.
In the spring of 2007, I put together a panel discussion on blogging. As a result of this panel, I was asked to help launch the IMF's first public blog. Soon after this, the External Relations department asked me to launch a public blog for the Fund's Chief Economist, Simon Johnson. I worked with the Mr. Johnson to create Simon Johnson's IMF Research Blog, which launched during the IMF's annual meeting in October 2007.
The Now
I left the IMF in 2008. These days I split my time between creating videos and teaching video workshops. I still have librarian tendencies, but restrict them to my music and book collections.
