I left Nova Scotia in July 1990 (on a half-time sabbatical from Acadia) intending to find another career, though it wasn't clear then what it would be. For me it was a matter of repotting, consequent upon having become root-bound after 18 years teaching at Acadia, I had thought that private secondary teaching might be the answer, but Northfield Mount Hermon (where I had sabbaticated 1986-87) didn't offer me a job. We decided to live in Northfield again anyway since John was starting his Freshman year at NMH (and he could be a day student) and it was convenient to Betsy's Visiting Scholar appointment at UMass Amherst. We bought a Macintosh and I started to work on a hypertext atlas of world music, and took up walking a couple of hours a day in the wooded hills around Northfield. I thought and wrote as I walked, and over the course of 3 months came up with the central question that propelled me into the next phase: ?what would be the consequences for libraries of the ubiquity of personal computers?

It was that question (which now seems a bit vieux jeu) that led me to the doors of the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons, in Boston. Peter Carini was a student and archivist there, and (after listening to what I thought I was interested in) he encouraged me to seek out Candy Schwartz and talk to her about it. So I went to Simmons in early January 1991 and said I was interested in auditing a course or two. The nice people in the office said that they didn't do auditors, just people in the Program. So I gulped and said "and what would it take to be in the Program?" and shortly thereafter was signing a check for tuition...

Going back to school was wonderful, partly because I happened to fall in with just the right people (Allen Smith and Candy Schwartz in particular), and partly because I decided I had the obligation to BE the sort of student I'd been claiming I wanted: interested, tireless, exploratory, committed... and I found that I could do that and do it very well. Library School involves a LOT of using libraries to answer questions, and I was deliriously happy haunting the Harvard and MIT libraries. I did a massive research paper on who cites Clifford Geertz, following the spread of several of his books across various disciplines, and another on the evolution of the subject classification in Harvard's Tozzer Library of Anthropology --all this in my first term. It was clear that I WAS a Reference Librarian, that everything in 40-some years of previous education had been preparing me for this calling. So: how to make the jump?

Betsy and I were climbing a mountain that spring (May of 1991, this was) and I was bitching on and on about how I couldn't stand to go back to Acadia, as she'd heard me do countless times before. Said she, through gritted teeth: "well, if you're so unhappy why don't you call them up at Simmons and see if they can't do something for you?" I got all silent (and she thought she'd offended me terminally by telling me what to do...) because I remembered seeing a bulletin board notice saying that someone was needed to run the Library School Computer Lab... so as soon as we got home I called the supervisor (coincidentally my advisor) and asked if they'd hired someone.... she said "noooooo..." I said "well, I'm interested" and she said "you mean YOU'd do THAT?" and the upshot was that I spent the next year finishing my courses and teaching library school students (and of course myself) about software and hardware and the early stages of the Internet (gophers scarcely existed, and of course the web not at all). Wonderful fun, never a dull moment, all sorts of seat-of-the-pants learning.

At the same time I took Science Reference with Jay Lucker, then-Head of the MIT Libraries, and again did a monster overkill. And then it was time to start trying to find a real job. Daunting problem: somebody in late 40s with a PhD in a maverick field looking for an entry-level academic reference job, with no "library experience" but 17 years as a professor...

So I applied for pretty much everything that moved, nearly 50 advertisements, many of them in places like Vermilion SD and others I'd never have considered. It took several months to start getting interviews, but in one week I had one here at W&L and another at Berea, and I was about to have others in Ontario and Maryland when I accepted the W&L job, just barely able to believe my good fortune.