 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SJSU School of Information Career Colloquia Session. My name's Jill Klief, and I am the iSchool's Career Center Liaison. Thanks for joining me tonight. We have the great pleasure of having John Shuler, one of our SJSU School of Information Lectures, with us to tell us about digital government and the career opportunities available for information professionals. And as Danielle has put in the chat box, you are welcome to tweet your comments out during the session, or Danielle will be tweeting those out as well. The session tonight is one hour, and we'll be recorded. I ask that you please hold your questions until the end of John's presentation when we open it up for Q&A. At that time, you may type your questions in the chat box, and please do feel free to ask John questions. I think there's going to be a lot of interesting information that he can share with us. During the presentation, please just keep the dialogue in the chat box to a minimum. So we're going to go ahead and get started, and I'm going to hand it off to you, John. So feel free to take it away. Jill, thank you very much. And I really appreciate everyone for agreeing to set some time aside this evening to have this brief chat, and I am really happy to be sharing with you some of my experience over the last 30 years of working within the government, as well as being what I think is somewhat unique now. I've been a government information librarian all my career for about the past 30 years or so. And to give you a bit of idea about my background, I've worked in California, I've worked in Oregon, I've worked in New York, and for the last 20 or so years, I've been at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I've worked in library associations, and I've worked on grants with federal agencies, as well as at the state and local levels. I'm also a government worker myself, being a professor at a public university. So my knowledge of the government comes from both being on the inside, as well as from my teaching and research. But I also want to make clear that I'm not here necessarily to give you career advice in that I know somebody that I could tell you about to give you a job. That could be handled in other ways. But what I think what I want to try to do in think of this as a way of paying it forward, what I'd like to do is to give you a glimpse into what I think your future jobs will look like while you're in the government. And it's an interesting time to be becoming a librarian. I usually joke with my students that when I was taught back in the late 70s and early 80s, I was being trained to become what I called a Gutenberg librarian. In other words, most of the traditions, most of the practices were based on nearly five centuries of dealing with printed books, collecting them, organizing them. And certainly within the last 100 years, everything that we've learned and understood as a profession since the creation of the American Library Association in the late 1800s. What I would tell the students at the time is I would tell them they are Marshall McLuhan librarians. But I find that even Marshall McLuhan is becoming opaque in so last century. So you all are, I guess, are no longer McLuhan librarians but you're really Google librarians because this is the world that you have now, this is your printing press, if you will. And just as that has affected you and your professional choices in the future as well as your present choices, it too has that Googleness has substantially affected the way government operates, especially in the last quarter century. And I will, what I wanted to do tonight is walk you through what I think that impact has been. And I hope at the end of this brief time we're together it will give you some new insights and new possibilities of how to apply or how to think that you can play a role in our beloved government when it's being funded and when it's operating properly. I know that is a challenge. I know that those of you who live in California until very recently were living through a very terrible political conflict and budget crisis. We here in Illinois are going through our own similar crisis over the last five or six months as the political parties haggle over things. And if you've been paying attention to the national news, you'll see that the same thing is happening at the federal level as the Republicans and Democrats square off over whether or not they will fund the federal government for the next while while they work out their issues. I think this is the first thing you should realize is that the government you want to join that you might want to find a job in now has as a steady part of its strategy and purpose the idea that they're going to be period of times when there is no government. And I'm working with some colleagues out of the University of Maryland and we're working on what we call government information librarianship without government, what does that mean? And it's a frightening prospect, but it's one that I think as a profession we're going to need to consider more and more as part of our standard operating procedure. In my best traditions of California-ness, I'm going to refer to these slides and what they refer to as the five noble truths of librarianship, librarians and the government complex. If there are five things that I want you to walk away from besides scratching your heads and saying what the hell was he talking about, I want you to walk away with these five ideas, notions of what is happening to the government complex and how that is going to affect librarianship, librarians and let's face it, I don't think we are necessarily librarians in the Gutenberg or even the Marshall McLuhan sense, but we're librarians that on that fifth noble truth, which I think is closer to the truth, we're librarians without a library and what does that mean? So these will be the points that we'll be going over. Let's begin with a little history. Any library job that you will apply for in any level of government will be affected by these principles. These are called information resource management principles. You may have run across this concept in some of your classes. If some of you have worked in government, especially in information fields or informational jobs where they talk about managing computer or technology resources, you may have heard somebody talk about information resource management. This is a very old concept in federal level government that has trickled down to the state and local governments, but it's a set of principles that were developed in the late 1970s when the idea that computers could have a strong impact on how the government can manage its information resources that through various laws and rules and regulations and practices, every agency was asked to keep these kinds of principles in mind as they develop their information resources. And the most important points that one can get from these legacies, if you will, is that the government considers information to be a value in and of itself. Before this period of time, information was considered a byproduct. It was considered something independent of other services or purposes that were part of the government's routines and purposes. There was a heavy emphasis on information technology, but it was more focused on the machinery rather than what that machinery produced. So IRM, information resource management, was a new concept. It had been part of business, the business world for about 10 years before it broke on the shores of government, but it represents the first solid separation between government information services and library services within government agencies. Before this time, before the early 1970s, one could argue and one would see in our literature that information services and library services were one and the same. The fork in the road started with these principles back in the early 70s, excuse me, early 80s, late 70s. The other disruptive factor that was introduced and will affect where you get your jobs if you're going to be working in government is the idea of private market, private market providers must play a role. This was a positive statement instituted through state and federal regulations that government services can be contracted out, that not all government services need to be handled by public officials, and the second point, costs should be recovered. So what had been taken to be free services or cost neutral services to citizens now has the idea that citizens or users could start paying for those services on a minimal level or a nominal level. And at that time, efficiency, economic recovery begin to have a different component where they begin to measure what they put into the information services versus what they put out of the information services. In other words, can we get the information cheaper? Do we have to build the same infrastructures? Do we have to hire the same people? That is a critical shift. That is what I would have called back in the last century a Marshall McLuhan shift. In more recent memory, it is a Google shift in attitude about the web, what the web can do. In other words, the web is more than just one or two or several or dozen people sharing a common computer platform. The web can actually begin to do something greater than some of the individual parts that make up the web. Two other things were thrown under the bus during this process. During long-term, there was a disinvestment, if you will, in long-term sustainability of resources. In other words, if it became more expensive to keep the information organized according to the traditional library approach, we should find a cheaper way to do it, which means we no longer have to think about how long do we keep the information. We only keep the information as long as we have to to serve our immediate purposes. The other function that was added to this mix was the idea of legacy systems. As the computer systems begin to upgrade with fair rapidity after the late 1990s, early 2000s, increasingly governments did not go back to their legacy systems and uplift them into the present world. And a lot of early library work, if you will, if you look at the 1990s and early 2000s were done on those legacy systems. And they may not have made it, they may not have made the technological jump into the current or future systems that many government agencies use. So this puts a different spin on the concept of, I've been to library and information graduate school, I consider myself an information service provider. Those skill sets that you imagine that you can describe may not be the same words or concepts used by the government in what they are looking for. So this is a fundamental, this is the fundamental disruption that has affected what the government has done since the mid-1980s. Now we're going to look at one other factor that is affecting the or future choices of jobs in the government. This is going to be your larger, your other large challenges. You seek jobs in the government complex. If your search terms are only using the term library, you are looking for a rapidly shrieking island. And what agencies are just doing is they're renaming their libraries, they're downsizing their libraries or they're eliminating their libraries and they're converting them to other things. They're converting them to information resource people, information specialists. Sometimes they're associated with the public affairs offices. Other times they become arms and legs of the information technology operations. But increasingly the idea of a library as a separate government agency is becoming less and less of a viable model for the government. And as government continues to collapse both on a organizational as well as economic scale, you will see them rolling up these traditional bibliographic institutions and either eliminating them, combining them or moving them and renaming them to something else. So as you look at the possibilities, key words you should use are information specialists, public information organization, knowledge management would be another term. But if you are only looking for work in libraries, it's a disappearing world. It doesn't mean it's going away, but the world that I grew up in, the Gutenberg world and certainly the world I've described many years as the McLuhan world is now being swallowed by the Google librarianship, the Google, the web as the library. This is not only happening in the government. If any of you work at academic institutions or other than San Jose, you have affiliation with academic institutions other than San Jose or you work in large public libraries where there were many services, service points or many branches, you will see that libraries throughout the universe are shrinking the number of things that they are doing. And one of the things that they are shrinking is specialized collection, branch libraries, specialized librarians. The joke I often use around the University of Illinois at Chicago is that I'm the last living government information librarian at UIC. And when I'm gone, I don't think I'm going to be replaced. When I was hired 22 years ago, I was responsible for one of the largest departments in the main library. I had nine librarians under my supervision about half dozen staff members and we were responsible for three different collections. Needless to say, all of that is gone. But even then, even despite that, I still managed to run as fast as I can and reinvent myself as much as I can. And I've managed to survive over the 10 years since that what I call the great disruption took place in my own professional life. There's how I did that and my advice to you and I don't need to be too overt about that because since we're a part of a colloquia that talks about a career center, I'm sure one of the principles that folks at San Jose and especially Jill might say to you is network, network, network. And that is a critical feature in this process. And you network by going to conferences, you network by watching listservs, reading blogs. If you see somebody who is saying something interesting, who's working near a place that you want to work, send word to them, say that you're a living, breathing, thinking new librarian, information specialist, and that, hey, wouldn't that be terrific if we can work together? So this tells you along with the information resource management principles that fundamentally the ground has changed within government. And you need to think about this as you plan your next employment strategies, if you will. And if you are applying for government, and this is what I call the transcendence of your careers, especially if you're interested in a career in government, that you're going to have to be a certain state of being for a while. And usually that state of being is what we call a contractor. Many government agencies, if they've downsized, reorganized, done different things to their libraries, as well as throughout all parts of their agencies, have now gone into hiring vast armies of contractor workers to do the same work. And what usually happens, what happened in the Gutenberg days is you would see a library job, you would apply for it, and in most cases at the federal level, and then in some cases at the state and local level, when you apply for that job, you become a civil servant. And that's good, that's why I call it nirvana, because being a civil servant gives you some protection against these wars between the political factions. However, what has happened over the last 25 years, and remember what I had said about the information resource management that cost is everything, that cost efficiency is everything, not only does that apply to the technology, but it also applies to the people that we hire to live with the technology. So civil servants over the last 25 years are becoming contractors. And these contractors live out on the web, and I'm sure that Jill and her staff can help point you towards those contractors that have grown up in the last 10 or 15 years. There are basically wranglers of specific skills and job training that you let these places know that you're on the market, that you have this skill set, and you want to know if they have any openings or you want to get on their lists. In some ways, the software that has grown up in the last two or three years, like LinkedIn, kind of serves in the same function. It works with many of these kinds of mediating institutions, but this is what you, instead of looking for a government job as a civil servant, initially, think about working as a contractor as your first step. And what they're going to want to know out of the gate is not only what you might know about information and organization knowledge or information service to clients or the public, but they're also going to want to know what you know about computers. And in fact, as I look at the job descriptions, as I talk to colleagues who are still in the government and still remember the days of the Gutenberg Librarian, they will say without reservation that the certain specific knowledge about government information technology, information technology in particular is crucial to, you need to demonstrate some clarity and skill level at understanding how computers work, understanding how databases work. So, one of the things that I recommend that you do is if you see a job, whether it's a civil service, Nirvana, or a contractor job, a couple of steps away from Nirvana, take a look at the agency's web page, not to see the management structure. None of that matters if you're a contractor. You live and die by other means, not by your management. But look to see how they structure their web page, look to see how they describe their information technology operation, see what they are publicly funded to do. In other words, if that part of the bureau or office or department is interlooking, in other words, their customers are inside the bureau, department or office, that's a different set of skills in terms of public service. If it's outward looking and you're dealing with the public, that requires a different set of skills and public outreach. Those kinds of indications that you've done that homework before you apply for the job or before you're, while you're being interviewed will go a long way because many of these contractors do not have a lot of time to make sure you have the skills you need. They need to drop you into the matrix as quickly as possible. And they're going to continue to be serving the government if they minimize the number of people that are bad fits. So back in the Gutenberg days, if you were hired as a civil servant, you were given a certain amount of training time to get comfortable, you know, find your seat, get to know the structure, yadda, yadda. In the contractor universe that now dominates our web world, you don't have that luxury. They expect you to arrive with that built in or if not built in, you're a pretty damn good talker and you can convince them you may not have all the bits and pieces, but damn, you learn fast. So those are the challenges that you have. And I will say, and I think I could be challenged by a number of my colleagues about sometimes they accuse me of being histrionic, but I think it's more dramatic to talk this way sometimes. But I think you can pretty much count that any government job that you're going to find is going to have those kinds of expectations. And you're going to have to deal with the impermanence of a contract, of being a contract worker versus the paradise of being a civil servant. And by the way, if you're thinking about going on into academic librarianship, academic institutions are changing greatly as well. And though I'm in a tenure track position right now, I got to say that everything that I see going on within higher education, within library faculty positions, whether it's in high schools or whether they're library faculty working with academic institutions, the notion of tenure, the notion of the academic appointment for these positions is very much up and graph. I should emphasize that isn't just for librarians. That's pretty much for all faculty. I joke with my colleagues in other departments around the university, at least those of us of a certain age, are probably the last generation of faculty members who have the expectation of being tenured on a regular basis. So if you're looking at the academic universe, I think you will see a version, not quite as harsh of this contractor impermanence that is happening, that is now a regular feature in the government. Okay, let's go on to the next slide and see where we can take all this. This is where I'm trying to give you advice that you find yourself out there on the job market. You're free of San Jose, you're charging forward, and this is my advice to you as you stumble into other people. And I alluded to some of this earlier that these are the things you should keep in mind, this particular noble truth, that if I had to distill this to a single statement, your education doesn't stop once you leave San Jose. And what you're going to find is that as you talk to people through your professional connections, and I saw in the early chat chatter that a number of you are going to the Internet Librarian Conference. Those conferences, if you can afford to go to them, if they're nearby, even if they're state or local or regional, if they're national, that's even better, are excellent places to connect, to meet people, to walk around and talk to people. And what you're going to find is in those conversations, those people will tell you, you know what you need right now in order to get what is hot right now. For instance, one of the things that I mentioned earlier, is hot right now is geospatial information. The governments, universities, they need people who know how to organize geospatial data, how to take data that is found through one project, link it to location information we have about our community, and build visually pleasing information. Byproducts. That's hot. That's not going to change. What is also hot, but isn't clear in many of the job descriptions, is they need people who are good storytellers. They need people who can talk about complicated things. Just that data visualization through graphs and colors and images, present information to people who know how to organize geospatial data. They need a set of once in future librarians who can talk about complicated things, complicated associations, in a way that other humans can understand. So those are two skill sets. First, they need people who know how to organize geospatial data. Second, they need people who know how to organize geospatial data. Third, they need people who know how to organize geospatial data. So those are two skill sets that I think you're going to need that are, as you wander around the machine and see other ghosts in the machine, this is what you're going to need to be talking about to those other ghosts that have jobs in the machine. I really think this is the world that you all are inheriting. I'm an old man. I'm like Moses. I will not see the promised land. You guys will. And I think one of the fundamental things you've got to grasp is that you are going to be asked to be a librarian without a library. And the essential thing that librarians have done for almost two millennia, maybe three millennia since the great cities grew in China, in Middle East, and elsewhere was that we organized stuff because we possessed the stuff. In other words, all our bibliographic techniques, all our public service attitudes were developed because we owned or we possessed or we managed the stuff physically. And increasingly, that is no longer possible. Because the stuff is now in the web. It is now created by other people. It is often delivered to communities without necessarily us being in the middle. What our possession allowed us to do back in the day was create relationships with our users. But now the web enables people to create their own information, send it directly to everybody else, and not involve a quote-unquote librarian-like role. Can anybody say YouTube? Can anybody say Google? 80% of our, I will tag that as a histrionic statement, 80% of our ready reference work that we had on our reference desks six, seven years ago has now fled to the web. And we no longer see those questions at our reference desks. So to put it another way, it's not about organizing information anymore, but it's about finding, distributing, and explaining it. And in that last statement, the semantic librarian, this is very similar to the concept that what we do is explain to people what they're doing wrong and finding the information. And here's how you can do it better. Have a nice day. So our relationship with our users is substantially different in that it's much more episodic and it's much more utilitarian, often focused on an immediate or very limited task. So there are very few opportunities for us to practice the concepts of preservation or survivability beyond the immediate needs of information within our community. I still think that is our responsibility, but I still do not think we figured out how we're going to do that in this digital world. So I'm going to give you what I think is going to happen, what a lot of my research is pointing me to, and what I call the civic engineers, the civic information engineers. And I think as a profession, if we figure this out, if I am not just a prophet who is alone in the desert and other parts of the profession, which I think they are, are figuring this out, these are the two sets of skills that I think you're going to need to have going forward. And they're somewhat explanatory. I'm not specific. I don't give you specific tasks that represent these things, but in a sense, I think this is going to represent our future. And in the next slide, I'll try to give this to you in a different way. So what I've done with this concept is try to use Boolean logic, yay, and try to give you the Venn diagram of where I think as information professionals, you will be drawing from in this new world. And this is just one aspect of what we could do. And think of this as sort of the metaphor for information research, or the information, what we would call back in the day our reference work. And what the center, where these three circles share is where we are most powerful. But it's where we stand, if you will. But the outer parts of the three circle are where we will continue to grow and improve our techniques. So this model is what overturns our possession of the information. So it is something that we continue to renew in ourselves as professionals, so that we are not surprised by future questions. And we enter into what I call in other parts of my research as anticipatory librarianship. In other words, we read the tea leaves enough. We anticipate what our communities might need by looking at these different circles. And we actually produce the early choices before they think they need it. This is how we can beat Google. Google is passive and dependent upon the users asking the questions in very specific ways. But there is nothing in the algorithms or nothing in the search engines, mechanics that enable it to anticipate where humans are going to go next. Librarians have always done that and we've always created classification systems. We've always organized our physical collections through cataloging and subject headings. We've always organized our information services with the idea that this is our community. These are the tools that they need based on our experience with them. So we're going to buy those tools ahead of time. This is what remains unchanged between the Gutenberg librarian and the Google librarian. So at this point everyone just go ahead and type your questions in the chat box and John can start answering them and then I'll help moderate as well. So I'll keep an eye on the questions as we're going through. I did want to emphasize that I'm teaching a class this semester. I'll be part of your world for the next couple of months if you want to send me a particular question. I forgot to include my email on the slide but I think Jill can add that to whatever is being distributed. But also I'm teaching a class called Government Information Resources and that particular class is designed specifically to understand government information. Maybe not in the sense that I'm going to go out and get the job but more from the idea that if I have to learn government information and I have to go to a library what do I need to know? And many of the things that I talk about in this class are specific tools, specific ideas but fundamentally I noticed that a couple of my students from that class are part of this. So I have to say this for their benefit. One of the things that I will tell you and I think this applies just as well for looking for a job in government you have to understand how the government works. In other words that civic lesson you had back in high school it's not enough. You've got to fundamentally understand how our government works right now and especially how our government works in this digital world. And you will find that the way I teach government information really is from that perspective and I find it deepens the student's appreciation of how to find the information because, well yes it is owned by lobbyists but we move beyond that and we explained, well I hope the class will be offered in the future but we hope to explain why the lobbyists are important to the process and what librarians or information professionals can add to the mixture to work with the lobbyists and against the lobbyists. Yes, that happens more and more now where the librarians are now getting involved in what I call the information food chain. So whereas in the Gutenberg days we were established at a particular part of the food chain where the meal was already prepared, people were feasting on it and they were already talking about what they were going to have tomorrow for dinner. What I'm beginning to experience in class at the university is increasingly librarians and information specialists are being invited to the table much earlier when the projects are being created, when they're being designed and when they are launched. There are jobbers if you will that hire contractors for the government. They sort of work with the agencies and the agencies say we need the following set of people to work on this particular project or for this particular purpose. The contractor goes out there, meets with the library schools, meets, goes to the professional associations, reaches out through listservs, works through LinkedIn and they recruit people that way. So the idea of getting, you don't present yourself as a contractee at any particular place. But I think Jill can help you out and being able to identify those sources of jobs. Yeah, I just posted a link in the chat box. There's a section on the career development pages. One, it talks all about how to use placement agencies and the value of using them. But the link that I put in the box lists some of the agencies that you could look for that specifically place people in government positions. So that would be a great place to start right there. And if you have colleagues who have moved on and gotten jobs, contract jobs, fellow graduates or soon to be graduates because many, what I discovered by teaching the class this semester is that many people are already working in the government as contractors. So as I said, networking is very important. To go back to the answer, the earlier question, is the GovInfo class going to be taught in the future? It will be if I hope I'm as successful as I want to be with the class. And I'm hoping to convince the dean and the powers that be that this was a worthy experiment to revive it and bring it back on a regular basis. I'm doing the best I can to make that happen. So John, you mentioned, let me check my notes here, what I wanted to say. I guess the question I have for you is do you see more jobs being created with just different titles and different names or are you seeing less jobs as we go forward in the government agency? In a confusing kind of way I see both because what I see is that jobs are being collapsed and combined in different ways. And so in the process of that collapsing and combining, they are reduced in number and they're moving further away from being called traditionally librarians. So often if you see the library name associated with the job, it may indicate that there's still a traditional library in place somewhere in the job description. But that doesn't guarantee that that library is going to be around in the future. So what I see happening is they change out words like information specialists, knowledge management specialists, sometimes public affairs specialists, information technology resource specialists, that kind of thing. It really varies a great deal from agency to agency but also in terms of in the contractor universe and in the civil service universe, sometimes the jobs are both steady on, in other words they don't change very much or they're quite fluid. If you're talking about the civil service universe, you will find that the job titles are fairly stable. In the contractor universe they can change quite quickly but the cradle of creation in that change is really within the agencies themselves. I noticed that there is a geo question and I think that may have referred to what I referred to as geo information specialties and this is a particular information technique that takes geographic information sources, map data and other things and associated with other points in a database to create visualizations, maps in other words, of where the data is and how relationships amongst the data may be identified and created. So it looks like a couple people are in the middle of writing something for the chat box which is excellent. Okay. Again on your point about you're seeing jobs being collapsed and combining. It sounds like you're seeing that exact same thing happen in the academic library setting as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact I'm in the process of drawing up what I call government information next gen for the University of Illinois of Chicago and it imagines a world as tough as this is going to be where I may not exist. So why are jobs being combined? The simple answer is because of technology. The computers are doing more and more of what we used to do as librarians. The algorithms are answering the questions to the search engines. The technologies are creating standards that are replacing the bibliographic records that we used to create by hand. And if we are no longer staffing discrete geographic points of service within our institutions or within our communities, but being able to do it online for 24-7, you don't need as many people to do that. You just need to manage them differently. So what you will have happen is that different tasks that were very specialized back in the Gutenberg days can now be combined in different and interesting ways. What also happens is that a library or an institution may need a new kind of position. So what they will do is take two old positions and collapse it into the new position. And yes, data visualization is a very common term that they use in describing this visualization of what do we do with this data and how do we understand it. What I don't see happening very often in library schools, which I find interesting, is to do the data visualization outside of information technology, what I call the narrative, of being able to describe the humans in a kind of conversational way, not through algorithms, just how complicated this is and what you need to know. I don't see that happening fast enough within our profession. But it's what I referred to jokingly as government whisperers or information midwives. You know, you're about to go through a very difficult process or complicated process, and here's what you need to know. Hang on. I've got a longer question here. Let me pull that up. Okay. Oh, no, it involves foreign languages. I'm taking a moment to read the question. That is an excellent question. What I would recommend that you do in terms of knowing what is anticipatory. I would imagine that Italian and German may be necessary, for instance, LC librarians, because they're still very much in a Gutenberg kind of way and processing books and other paper and print material, as well as digital material that is being produced in other languages. If you're interested in information jobs in the State Department, they would expect that you would have a foreign language skill because, not because you're an information specialist, but because you're going to be working in foreign countries. In terms of relevant technology preferences are changing. The best way to understand that is to not pay attention to the library literature, but pay attention to what's coming out of where you all are, or where you all are going to school digitally, which is what's happening in Silicon Valley. So see what the latest apps are. Read government information technology, magazines. Talk to people who are involved in areas of information technology. And it's like trying to predict the stock market in some ways. You know that some things are going to stay stable technology-wise. So it is best not to focus on any one technology. Ten years ago, librarians were required to learn HTML. It is something we had to do. I don't think that is a requirement anymore. Since so much of HTML is now in the background and it happens automatically, you now have services like Squarespace that automatically throw up web pages where you don't need to look under the hood. I think the advice I would have to give you is to pay attention, at least in the popular press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Economists, CNN, those kinds of places, Reddit, and see what is going on out there. Because usually the government is maybe two or three years behind what is happening in the private sector. I hope that answers the question. We have just two minutes left. If there is any last minute quick questions for John, go ahead and type them in the box. John, it looks like maybe Danielle is typing a question. Okay. And then that might be our very last question. All right. We'll wait for that. Let me see if we can come in here. There she is. Okay. I knew somebody. She wants to work in the Vatican. Whose dream isn't it to work in the Library of Congress? You know, that's a tough one. I would say right now they're about to hire a new head librarian. And I would suggest that after that hiring is done, that is the time to look at possibilities. Right now the Library of Congress is still stuck, as I said earlier, in the Gutenberg kind of mode. And most of the librarians would be looked like very traditional librarians and not kind of the librarians that I anticipate. They are civil service jobs, but more important, they are civil service jobs that work within the legislative branch. It is a different world in the legislative branch in terms of working. So if you want to set up a side conversation, we can talk about that a little bit. But I would say the Library of Congress is going to be an opportunity in the near future rather than right now. So any other questions? It is a beautiful building. All right. I think that's it, John. Before we ring off, I want to thank everybody for the opportunity to talk to you. I hope this is the beginning of a long relationship. I enjoy this very much. I can't work this stuff for three decades and not have something to share with everybody. So I hope it's been at least interesting, if not informative. Thank you. I thought it was great. I'm going to give you a little thumbs up. Exactly. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for your time, John. Bye. Good night, everyone.