Reading and learning have been an integral part of my life since an early age. Although our neighborhood wasn't all that far from the county library, for a few summers the bookmobile made a stop there solely due to the volume of books my brother and I checked out. At some point in my childhood when asked the perennial "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question, I asked if there was a job where I could read books all day. My path through a journalism degree and first jobs at newspapers didn't lead to an editorial role at a publishing house where I could read novels all day. But it has led to a fulfilling career in delivering critical medical and scientific information along with other scholarly content to the academic community and beyond.
My initial responsibilities as a production assistant in our fledgling book packaging company were scanning photos and line art using a flatbed scanner, then combining those images with text from Word into book page layouts using QuarkXPress, and answering the telephone. Many of the phone calls were from the manager of the Dave Matthews Band, calling for Silverchair's co-founder Thane Kerner, who handled graphic design during the band's early years. Dave himself would occasionally drop by the office and hang out for a while.
Fast-forward through several years of technology shifts from postscript files to PDFs, floppy disks to Zip drives, Palm Pilot apps and CD-ROMs to the first website we built featuring the full text of Neurology in Clinical Practice (published at the time by Butterworth-Heinemann) in SGML. From there, it was a transition away from print production and into the world of software development, XML, project management, and ultimately into my current role leading the team that builds new customer sites on the Silverchair Platform.
Building sites on the platform has been an evolution as well. The early implementations took many many hours, sometimes needing an entire team to build out the site features for a single publisher. Over time, we have introduced automation and process improvements that have transformed implementations. We've gone from weeks to stand up the base sites and tools to having our own version of an "Easy Button" that does those tasks in a matter of days. Our experienced build team – one team – is currently working on six implementations, while still supporting a recently launched client. Now when I join business development colleagues on calls with prospective clients, I can offer reassurance that we have a mature, efficient migration process that runs smoothly and consistently delivers on scope and schedule.
People are often surprised to hear that I've been with the same company for as many years as I have. My stock response is, "Oh, I've had like six different jobs that all happened to be at the same company." But the reasons go deeper than that. When I took that first production assistant job, it was just that – a job. I gambled on a tiny company to allow me to move to a daytime schedule (after nights/weekends on copydesk at the local paper), knowing I could fall back to a newspaper job easily enough. As the company grew, I felt more invested in our success. I still remember the feeling of pride when walking past a student bookstore near the grounds of the University of Virginia and seeing medical books I had helped produce in a window display. That feeling persists through interactions with medical professionals who recognize and use many of the sites we host on the platform today.
That job and the career that it became continue to give me opportunities to learn new skills, meet and collaborate with interesting people, travel on occasion, and be part of building a company that helps make the world a better place. I consider myself fortunate to be part of an organization that delivers so much value not only to the scholarly publishing community and its consumers, but also to the local Charlottesville community. From the number of people employed by the company over 30 years, to supporting local businesses, to charitable contributions, that's quite an impact. With the acquisition of ScholarOne, we've teamed up with another long-standing Charlottesville-based company working in the scholarly publishing space. I'm excited to see what impact the larger organization will have in both our local community and the broader scholarly publishing space as we embark on this next decade together.