With New Growth comes New Opportunities

You all know that I've been hard at work here at OCLC--pretty much since the day I arrived--to create the Developer Network site and make it useful, functional and helpful for you, the library development community. And helpful for anyone else who ventures over, like partners or non-technical librarians, who might need some information about APIs, widgets or what-have-you. I'm proud of what we've accomplished together so far--although of course I have a list as long as my arm of things I would still like to do for Developer Network, too.

But you also probably remember that little project we've been working on called the WorldShare Platform. Oh yeah, THAT. It has been incredibly rich and rewarding to get to be on the ground level for planning how the infrastructure works, testing, documenting, experimenting, more testing, and so on. Getting knee-deep in code was really refreshing after years of administration work. I'd missed it. And having spent two years learning all the people on all the far-flung development teams at OCLC, helping them understand what an outside developer needs in order to be successful (and providing context about their--YOUR--environment)...I realized I was really really liking this part of my role here on Developer Network. Sort of as the "external context translator and viability tester" for internal OCLC teams. And OCLC staff will need a whole lot more of it going forward, as we release more and more APIs to the Platform, and create the new services on the Platform infrastructure like the new WorldShare ILL and WorldCat Discovery services.

So that's a long preamble to say I'm not going away at all--I still plan to have office hours, see you at conferences like CIL next week and generally support you in your app-creation with the Platform Web services. But we've also realized that there is simply more work than one hard-workin' Library Web Chic can do in a day/month/year in order to have the Platform and Developer Network be as successful as possible and grow into the vision of what it can be for you. So. We're growing the Developer Network (the community) and the WorldShare Platform (the product) teams. I wanted you to hear it from me, lest you wonder what I'm doing. Still here! Ready for more! Ready for Reinforcements to arrive! Here are the open positions:

• WorldShare Platform Community Manager. The Community Manager will act as a champion for OCLC’s WorldShare Platform within the development community, creating awareness of the Platform and supporting its adoption in the library and other development spaces. The successful candidate, therefore, will have a comprehensive knowledge not only of library workflows, but also of platform development processes. Strong knowledge of other business process systems, such as Blackboard, PeopleSoft, and 3M, as well as 3rd party platforms and social networks is also a plus. Robust knowledge of WMS functionality and integration with other OCLC products and services would be extremely beneficial.
• WorldShare Platform Technical Product Manager. This position will lead requirement definition and prioritization for the Platform infrastructure and Web service externalization efforts. Working closely with the development team leader and the WorldShare Platform Community Manager, the Product Manager will evaluate and document both external and internal needs associated with the use of services and development/integration of apps; she/he will also work across portfolios to coordinate, from a product perspective, service development and exposure. The incumbent will also act as a liaison across infrastructure teams (IDM/WSKEY, MSI, etc.) to ensure an effective, consistent user experience.

Sound like pretty sweet deals, huh? Go to the OCLC Careers site to read more about these new roles for our team, and to apply.