by Alexis Rohlfing, previous Head Editor, INALJ New Hampshire
previously published 4/30/13

You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might get what you need

For those of us who are not working a library job, one of the most frustrating experiences is that sense of being ‘on the outside looking in.’ The sense that you volunteer, you work on committees, but the day to day work of the bill paying job seems to be ever present and in the way. Here and on other blogs, there are discussions of transferable skills and ways of connecting non library experience to library experience. One thing that can be easy to overlook is the need for information professionals in the corporate world. It brings to mind a scene from the tv show “House,” in which the titular doctor, in one of his trademark tantrums, explains that “As the philosopher Jagger says, you can’t always get what you want.” At the end of the episode, his boss comes back to him and says “Oh, I looked into that philosopher you quoted, Jagger, and you’re right, ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ but as it turns out ‘if you try sometimes you get what you need.’”

I recently had such an experience. In my job, there are resources that we use everyday to do our jobs. The main resource that my colleagues and I rely on recently underwent a major redesign: information moved to completely different places within the system and suddenly even the most tenured representatives sounded as though it was their first day in the training room. The most popular response among the reps was that they (meaning corporate) needed to “put it  back”– but that’s as nuanced as the argument got.

Certainly, I was as annoyed as the others when the changes first took place, but I realized that I had one major advantage: my library background. I spoke with my manager, and my manager spoke with her supervisor, and suddenly I was the “subject matter expert.” I was putting together training sessions that I presented to my team, passing along job aids and resources that I had developed to navigate the resources and databases that we use day in and day out, and those job aids were passed along to other teams and to management.

While this has not moved me out of my current role, I can now say that I have experience with training people to use resources, that I have been able to exert some small influence on the further development of these internal resources, and hopefully, I will be able to move toward the content management group. What could have been just another opportunity to gripe and grumble has provided a networking opportunity, an opportunity to show my skills are very useful even outside a library, as well as providing a much needed boost to my own decision to pursue an information professional role that is much different than what I had envisioned in library school. Sometimes, its good to remember that you can’t get what you want, but if you try, and you keep an open mind, you might get what you need.