One of my favourite bands was…is…Talking Heads. I still think they’re brilliant, as ageless as Sophia Loren. The title of this post is from “Once in a Lifetime”, a burned-in-the-brain tune, for sure. The last line of the first stanza is “And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here?”
You may not have asked yourself how WebJunction BC came to be “here.” But I think about that often, as one of the members of the cross-organizational team that believed BC library staff needed and deserved a central web place to gather and find useful content.
So I decided this web post is about how we got here.
The sponsors of WJBC are BCLA, BCLTA, BCTLA and PLSB. But behind those acronyms are people who are seeking ways for members and constituents to benefit from Web 2.0. We want people–where ever they are in British Columbia–to feel part of the library community, to be able to connect with colleagues, to be able find useful courses and content, to share opinions, and to do this in a space that does not divide us into silos, but unites us.
Here’s the people behind WJBC. There’s me, Executive Director of BCLA. My colleague, Allie Douglas, Office Manager of BCLA. Errin Morrison, Executive Director of BCLTA. Heather Daly, President of BCTLA. Kyle Armour and Ene Haabniit of PLSB. A hat tip to Trish Rosseel, now at UBC but at PLSB during the early decision making days, and Tania Alekson, a soon-to-be-graduated student at UBC’s SLAIS who is on board for the summer to help us out.
How we got here is…is…hmmm…well, how we got here is through nothing that looks like a committee. It’s a small enough group in a small enough pond that we started out by agreeing on certain fundamentals and extrapolating from there…OK, if we believe that, how do we get there? The spice of lack of staff and lack of funds (for the 3 associations) contributed to our creativity stew.
And there we are! Ad hoc structure, a willingness to be comfortable with ambiguity and lack of documentation and guidelines, and a commitment to the goal of providing a rich content environment to BC library staff drives us forward.
Where will we be a year from now? I hope we will have found funding for continuing WJBC. I hope that the community will have seen clearly the value of a shared BC library space.
And I hope you enjoy this Muppet version of “Once in a Lifetime” . It’s brilliant.
