From the Chair

To my surprise, my year as GODORT chair is over. Equally surprising: it has been just over a year since I left the University of Georgia to move into library administration at North Dakota State University. While I was in fact job hunting when I agreed to run for chair in 2017, at the time it did not occur to me that there was a good possibility that these two challenging situations would not only overlap but happen simultaneously. Over this past year, I told many people that had I known that would be the case, I never would have run for GODORT chair. In retrospect, I am not so sure that is true. Job hunting is at best a crapshoot; with so many variables and uncertainties, you rarely know how things will go until you get a job offer. I had interviews for jobs I thought would be too much of a stretch given my experience and heard nothing from places I assumed would at least give me a phone interview. My favorite rejection letter was a terse, two sentence email with the subject line “Not Selected” that came months after the position in question was filled. Talk about breaking it to you gently! Although I was getting enough interviews to think I would find a new job at some point, at the time I had no idea when that would be; for all I knew, I would still be at UGA when I started my term as GODORT chair. Ultimately, I decided that being in the middle of a job search was no reason not to run, and so I did; the rest is history.