What goes around...

Comes around.
It turns out that today, oddly enough, is my 5 year anniversary at OCLC.

And what a crazy 5 years it has been! I've often remarked that I never expected to be here so long. Each time I've thought to explore "life after OCLC," something or someone new comes along and shakes up the status quo. A little curiousity goes a long way. A lot of curiosity goes more than 5 years, as it turns out...

I was hired by Debbie Hysell into the Documentation Department as a Web intern in 2000. Lance Osborne and Lisa Plymale were my office mates--they kept me out of trouble and taught me HTML, Dreamweaver and Photoshop as fast as I could absorb it.

It was back in the heydey of Webmania. Let's see if I can find a wayback machine view of the site: Feb. 29, 2000. Can anyone else say UGLY? And we knew it was ugly--but the rush to publish daily, get the news out, watch the stats go up, fix the broken links (by hand...)--it was all heady stuff. We loved it.

There's nothing I can quite compare to those first months. I would look up from being totally absorbed in a task--only to realize it was 4 pm and I was still drinking my morning coffee...

Then in July 2000, I moved into the then-Communications group headed by Phil Schieber. Under Phil and crew, I learned the print world. Back then, we proofed bluelines and prepped CMYK ad negs for publishers. PDFs did not exist! I learned to write ad copy, dig for facts from product managers and do conference signage in spades.

As luck would have it, Cathy De Rosa came on board as our new Vice-President for Corporate Marketing in November 2001. And she brought in our then-outside branding consultant Jenny Johnson in March 2002. Jenny became our Creative Director and jumped into the OCLC fray with both feet. From Cathy I learned strategic vision and action. From Jenny I learned branding and creative execution skills. And OCLC got a revised brand architecture, new WorldCat brand, expanded color palette, new Web site, a Web store, the "Librarians make the difference" campaign and much more...

Sometime around August 2002, Gregor Gilliom joined the team as our Information Designer and manager for our creative group. Gregor was instrumental in making me a better writer and visual information designer. Now I find myself recommending his edits to my own (and others') copy. He and Phil are my two writing pillars of OCLC.

So here we are at 5 years.

Of course, there have been plenty of additional influential people along the way, who've since gone on to explore life after OCLC: Kerri Allen, Susan Berntson, George Promenshenkel, Diana DiPaolo, Linda Shepard...to name a few.

Thanks for the memories. Onward and Upward!