By disposition, I'm a generalist with a technical bent. This means that I'm pretty well suited to my current position where I manage digital collections and metatdata with Oregon Health & Science University. I do a bit everything -- planning, programming, you name it. For the 5 years prior to my current position, I was was the head of Digital Services for the Orbis Cascade Alliance library consortium, and for the 5 years prior to that, I was the head of systems at the Oregon State Library.
Few people dream about becoming librarians when they are little, and I was not one of the ones who did. That's just as well since I wasn't very well informed when I was 5 years old -- I wanted to be a garbage man because you get to drive a cool truck. Fortunately, my parents weren't the kind of ninnies who think that kids should be encouraged to do everything that pops into their impressionable minds.
Before I became a librarian, I held a variety of interesting but low paying jobs. I worked in Czechoslovakia and Russia, I temped for a nonprofit in Washington DC, and I have more restaurant and retail experience than I feel like confessing to.
Truth be told, I've liked all the jobs I've ever had, including the ones that had me washing dishes or mopping floors after two o'clock in the morning. The cool thing about so called crummy jobs is you know you make life easier for others and that they'd miss you if you were gone.
Although this page is about my professional life, I'm assuming that you're reading it because you're curious about what I do rather than thinking of offering me a job. If you do fall into the latter category for some reason, I recommend checking out the rest of my pages since they say what I'm like a lot better than this page does.