It's Been Nice...Well, no, really is hasn't.

I am retiring.

The school where I have spent half my adult life (really? Is that possible?)is so screwed up and I am so tired of the bullshit. I am tired of people who say that you don't need libraries, that you don't need books, that everything is online anyway, that we -- the people who help them navigate the information overload -- are useless.

I've spent all of my life around books, mostly in libraries but also in an independent bookstore. I am not a technophobe. I lust after iPads and Kindles. I embrace library technology like keyword searching and do not regret saying goodbye to print indexes. I know a good thing when I see it.

So it's not the library that has failed me but my institution. It's hard to work where you aren't appreciated or understood and your input is ignored or ridiculed.

It's just time to move on. Where to, what do, remains to be seen. But I'm smiling.