Plagiarized!

I can't decide whether to feel honored or violated here...


A few days ago I wrote a blog post called "What I Do," which talks about my current job as Chief Information Officer. The post included a link to my job description online, which can be found by clicking this link. That job description includes a job goal that is stated as follows: "To propose the information technology that the Erlanger-Elsmere School District will need to achieve its educational goals and then to work within a budget to implement the plan."



Yesterday I needed some information about the role of Chief Information Officer for a presentation I was working on, so I searched the Internet for the phrase "Chief Information Officer." And what I found was that page after page online included a variation of what's written in my online job description. You can see for yourself by clicking this link.

That's not a big deal, you're probably thinking. Whoever created your job description probably borrowed the job goal from one of these definitions. No big deal.

Except here IS the problem: I wrote that job goal myself, four years ago! The goal that was written before was this circuitous, nonsensical description* that said absolutely nothing about what I did in my job, and I was embarrassed that it was on our district website. It was there for a year before it occurred to me, Hey! I'm the district webmaster. I can't officially change the job goal as that's done by the Board of Education. But I can at least change what's online to give a better description of what it is I do. And so I wrote the phrase that's boldfaced above. I wrote it all on my own, with no help from the Internet.

So that means that since then someone somewhere, while doing research on the title of Chief Information Officer, stumbled upon my web page, liked what I'd written, and modified it to get the sentence that appears on all of those other web pages. That person posted it on some web page and others have been copying it ever since. And as I mentioned at the start of this entry, that makes me feel honored and ticked off all at the same time. Because I don't see any credit issued for this lifted sentence!

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*I did some research and found in my files the original job description that I found so poorly written: "To develop and maintain a program of computer education that uses to the best advantage the computer capabilities of the district for the educational excellence of this and other instructional programs."