You know, with the library science background, the library employment experience, and some familiarity with technology, there are any number of possibilities in technology, software consulting, software development, knowledge management, etc. The buzzword that every company in the world was chasing last year was “customer experience”, which means something different to everyone you ask, but for many companies had to do with presenting information to customers in appropriate ways – knowing who the customers are, what the company’s previous interactions with the individual customer have been, what things interest the customer, etc. Some of this ties into the favorite buzzword of a few years ago, “Customer Relationship Management (CRM)”, but beyond managing the information about the customer, there’s another whole realm of managing content about the company, its products and services, etc. This realm, which is generally referred to as “Enterprise Content Management (ECM)”, has to do with the creation, management, tracking, and appropriate deployment of all of that information, in appropriate language, media, form, etc., when and where the customer needs it. To drive that effectively, companies are discovering that they have to deal with issues of ontology, taxonomy, metadata, etc. – they have to make sure that they know what there is to know about all of the content that they’re spending so much money to generate, and that that knowledge is maintained, organized, and disseminated in ways that make accessible to the people and, increasingly, systems that need it.
While I suspect that the hype around “customer experience” has died down somewhat (I got out of the ECM world about a year ago myself), a lot of those efforts – the ones that were better conceived and executed – will continue, and will generate opportunities for people like yourself who understand how information and knowledge can be most effectively organized and managed. My former employer, for example, had one product that was designed to automatically generate keyword, summary, and category information from textual content items (Word docs, PDFs, text files – including web pages – etc.) based on predefined taxonomic information. The rub was that developing the appropriate taxonomic information was beyond the abilities of most of the people at our customers who got assigned to work on it, and beyond the skills of our general consulting team. So we had two consultants with MLS degrees who had spent time in the general library, corporate library, and knowledge management fields. There were people with similar backgrounds involved in product management, support, and development for that product.
Of course, there’s still quite a bit of customer contact in any of those except development, and even there you’ve got product management as the customer to deal with. I would think that in the Boston area, however, there are likely to be any number of corporate library positions that might at least be a change of pace from the academic library world.
