There I was merrily absorbed in the holiday spirit, running my daily Jingle Bell 5K and sharing a candy cane a day with my dear blog readers, when all of the sudden …
SCREECH!!!
It may be more appropriate to say that my two feet hit the gas pedal – VAROOOOOOM!!! – than the brakes, but regardless of how you see it, my holiday streaks were tossed off the rooftops and my blog posting has been MIA for 2+ weeks now. That said, I refuse to let 2014 close without one final post, so here goes:
If you read my last post (12/15), you know that as of that date I began a new job as a Research Evaluation Analyst for the University of Massachusetts Center for Clinical and Translational Science. I still work at the UMass Medical School campus (right down the hall from the Library), still enjoying all of the relationships I’ve built over the years. In fact, it’s those very relationships – both around the campus and in the larger academic medical library world – that helped me land this job. And while it’s immensely different in so many ways from the work that I’ve been doing for the past years as an embedded research librarian and informationist, it’s also a position that will allow me to expand on many of the skills I honed during that time.
So what am I doing now? That’s a question pretty much everyone, with the exception of my new colleagues in the UMCCTS, has asked. Right now, I’m working madly with the rest of the grant writing team, pulling everything together before the January 15th proposal deadline. The UMCCTS is funded through a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health, a 5-year grant that expires this year. As you can imagine, I came on board at one heckuva time to come on board. I’ve been playing catch up and keep up at the same time; reading accepted, past proposals from other universities, reading articles on the state of evaluation of the CTSA program as a whole, reading articles on different evaluation research from individual CTSA awardees, and reading the many different components of our own proposal in their many different iterations.
And I’ve been writing; writing a section on the measurement and evaluation program for our Center as a whole, writing annotated versions of the evaluation pieces for the individual components, writing tables and charts, and writing my list of all the people that I’ll send Christmas presents and/or cards to after the middle of January. What I’ll be doing after the grant goes in (and, fingers crossed, gets awarded) is working on all of the evaluation pieces and projects that I’ve spent these weeks describing. I’ll also be working actively with other CTSA award sites, in particular their evaluation teams, on collaborative research projects that will help us determine the effectiveness of the program on a national level. It’s in this latter part that I’ll get to maintain a number of librarian connections, as well as build some new networks of colleagues (and, if evaluators are like librarians, friends).
Do I like it? That’s the other question I get of late. Honestly, I don’t know yet. I like the subject of evaluation and measuring the impact of research. I like the bits that I was able to dabble in while working in the Library. I like research. I like reading and learning new things. I like seeing UMMS from a different perspective. I like the people. I even like the change of pace, even in its whirlwind form. I’m glad that I followed-up on an opportunity and that it’s come to be what it is right now, but it’s still awfully early in the change; too early to give a definitive “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”
My highlighted, coffee-stained notebook from that year of hard study. Despite the years, I’ve never been able to throw it out.
However, what this early experience reminds me most of is being in graduate school. In particular, it reminds me of the amount of time and effort and work that was involved in learning all of the systemic and cellular physiological mechanisms of exercise for the two courses I took on that subject. I can clearly remember one very bright, sunny, Saturday afternoon in late fall, sitting at the conference table in the room on the 2nd floor of the health sciences building (outside the grad students’ office) with my good friend and classmate, Suzanne Connolly (say it with an Irish accent), working our way through every little step and every confounded enzyme and every change in positive or negative ions to open this or that Calcium channel … all to make one heart beat happen. I can remember talking it through over and over, drawing pictures on the white board, trying to get it, to understand the process, to put all of the pieces together in my head until finally … BLING!! … the lightbulb went on. And I remember feeling REALLY satisfied. Because it was hard. It was hard, but I’d stuck with it until I got it. And I think that’s why this study day memory stands out so clearly in my memory bank.
I’ve felt that way at other times, too; learning a particular riff on the mandolin or learning to cross-country ski. It takes focus and effort. And it’s about learning, not necessarily about competence. I was (am) a very competent librarian. There was certainly a period of time, early in my career, when I had to put forth a good bit of focus and effort to learn something new, but whenever you’ve been doing something for a good while, the amount of effort you have to expend towards the work decreases. You may still spend the same amount of time and you may still have the same amount (or even more) tasks to attend to, but the amount of effort is different. You’re efficient at what you do. You may not be completely on auto-pilot, but you can probably get to and from work without always remembering the drive.
My first couple of weeks (less a 2-day Christmas break) have been about learning. I’m a long way from being a competent evaluator. The learning curve is steep and challenging, but when I feel overwhelmed, I remember that study day and I remember piano recitals and I remember cruising along on the successes that came from the hard work of learning to be a good librarian. I remember the satisfaction that came with those experiences and I trust that in time, I’ll enjoy the same in my new role.
Between here and there, I’ll keep sharing the journey. After all, a librarian by any other name is … still a librarian.
A Librarian by Any Other Name 