Michael Saint-Onge, LexisNexis Team Lead for the LexisNexis Librarian Relations Group, writes about the challenges of change, taking stock, and thinking about the future as he turns 50 in this Librarian Relations Group Monthly Column entitled: True Confessions: Personal and Professional Reflections on Turning Fifty.
Here's an excerpt:
I recently celebrated my fiftieth birthday, and no, it wasn’t traumatic — no midlife crisis, no expensive little sportscar purchased to compensate for my waning youth (actually, at fifty, I think it is now fully waned…). But there is something about reaching a milestone that makes one sit up and notice. Life is good, thankfully, but I think it’s a perfect opportunity to “take stock” and figure out where I’ve been and where I am going, both personally and professionally.
It is obvious that there have been some profound changes in our profession during my lifetime. Can you imagine what a law librarian from 1959 would think of a modern law firm library? I think her first question would be “What happened to all the books?” but she couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much information we now have at our fingertips. And we don’t even have to go fifty years back to marvel at these changes. Just in the twenty-three years I’ve been a law librarian, we’ve seen incredible advances. (Have you ever noticed that when a bunch of librarians of a certain age get together, we start to sound like those two old men in the balcony on The Muppets? “In my day, we didn’t have the World Wide Web. We had to FTP files.” “Yeah? In my day the only computer we had was that huge Lexis® terminal in the corner of the library with the rolled paper we had to cut down to size so the attorneys could read it.” It’s the librarian’s equivalent of bragging about having to walk to school in the snow, barefoot.)...
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