Hello and welcome! I’m Chris and I am a librarian. I work as a contractor at an office in a bureau at a U.S. government agency. My main job is wrangling all of the data my office collects, with a side of electronic resources management.
We all have been teleworking for just about a year now due to the pandemic. It’s been fascinating to watch a bureau that was totally unprepared to telecommute suddenly find its groove and to watch an agency that needed to upgrade its systems bust its butt to push out new technology under very difficult circumstances.
That said, I’ve been pretty lucky to work in an office that has always had a restless need to find new ways to do what we do and manage what we need to manage. Between that and a progressive telework policy (I’ve been an active telecommuter for over a decade now), I feel like we’ve been ahead of the game in so many ways as we deal with how the pandemic is changing the way we work and how we carry out our mission. I’m trying not to be smug about that.
Our mission, by the way, is public diplomacy, something that even its practitioners seem to define differently depending on their jobs. Understanding the librarians’ role in PD is a huge part of what I do all day, when I am not managing spreadsheets. I manage a lot of spreadsheets, y’all.
All of which means that this blog is going to be a bit about teleworking and productivity and a bit about public diplomacy and probably a bit about spreadsheets too. Also, I’m a huge music fan, so I’m going to share a lot of songs in my posts. Enjoy!