5 years

Today in the LSW Meebo room, Steve and Laura were talking about birthdays and Steve mentioned his blog was turning 3 this month. It made me remember I had started this blog sometime in August, so I went back and looked it up. Yep, Monday, August 11, 2003. This blog turned five, this past Monday, August 11, 2008. Not as ancient as Librarian.net or Whatever, but pretty darn old in terms of blog lifetimes.

In addition to this website being 5 years old, so is my LIS degree. In the mail today, I received a survey from my alma mater sent out to everyone who graduated in 2003 asking about the perceived value of their degrees. As if I needed yet another reminder of how quickly the time is passing. Five years tends to be a magic cut off in libraryland. If you've been working fairly steadily since you got your degree, you're probably over-qualified for many entry level positions, but if you're like me, you may not have the supervisory experience needed to move up in the ranks. Five years flies by like you wouldn't believe, and while you may expect to have some supervisory responsibilities by this point, it's not likely unless you've done some job hopping or you got really lucky (if supervising is what you want to do). This has an impact on my career planning, and the five years of experience and what that experience is in is a major cog in any plans for my future.

I've been thinking about the last five years a lot lately. Much of it in reference to this blog being for and about issues relating to young librarians. After five years in the field, I no longer feel all that "young". I've barely kept this blog updated for the last two years, and I think that's even more indicative of me no longer feeling that young.

I've been on the fence about retiring both the YL blog and YL site. Part of it is that I've built up a professional identity using "younglibrarian" on Gmail, Twitter, FriendFeed and a number of other services so I'm not ready to give up the moniker. The other part of me knows that I'm no longer contributing much to the original mission of the blog and site. I have other outlets where I let my creative energy fly free and I'd rather post in those venues.

What it comes down to is I'm recognizing that I'm in a period of professional maturation, and this part of my life may need to be placed on indefinite hiatus.