It’s Library Day in the Life time again. I do love this project, and I love it when libday posts start appearing in my RSS feed. It’s fun to hear what other librarians do, what other jobs are like, what kinds of work and projects are happening in the field. And it’s fun for me to write up my own posts, too. I’ve participated in this project a few times in the past, and I find it valuable to take time to reflect on the work I’m doing, and how I spend my time at work.
This year I decided to do a single post wrapping up the whole week, instead of trying to write something everyday. Mainly because I didn’t really think I’d have enough interesting stuff going on to post everyday. Lucky for me, I ended up having a more fun and productive week than I anticipated. This felt like my first full week in the office in ages, what with the holidays and a three day weekend, and being out due to minor injury, and going to ALA. I was kind of nervous about that, like what if five straight cubicle days made me nuts? Thankfully, it’s Friday and I don’t think I’m nuts. I think I made it. Whew.
So what did I do this week? The main project I’m working on has been in a phase where the bulk of our work (for now) is done, and other people are doing a lot of work instead. This will change soon, but it’s been a bit slow, and I’ve had a chance to work on some other things.
I submitted an article to a journal, and got my peer review feedback, which indicated that the article needed a lot of work. Ouch, but totally what I expected. So this week I’ve spent a good chunk of every day revising revising revising. And adding more citations. And revising again. I’m hoping to wrap that up today and send it back, with fingers crossed.
In December, I attended a two-day workshop called Leading from any Position, and I was asked to present on what I learned. The presentation was scheduled for this Wednesday, so I spent Monday and Tuesday making slides and reviewing notes and pulling out the most important stuff from an intensive two-day workshop to try to present in 20 minutes. The presentation was a success, and a handful of my colleagues were excited about some of the ideas. I just set up a meeting in two weeks to get any interested parties together to talk more about how we might implement some new things in our projects and in our whole organization. I love this kind of thing, so I’m looking forward to it and hoping lots of other people are excited, too.
We’re gearing up for the next phase of development for the main project I’m working on, so I took some time on Tuesday to pull together a table detailing every part of the project we’re committed to build, what we’ve done, and what we still have to do. I reviewed some open issues related to the website portion of the project to try to pull out what still needs to be done. And I looked at a few recently drafted policies to tease out metadata requirements and get a sense for how we need to build the rest of the system. Finalizing requirements for this project has been a bit of a challenge, so we’re constantly on the look out for unspoken bits and pieces we need to be aware of. I also got some test records for the next phase of the project, so I spent some time reviewing those. I need to do more review, and I have some questions for the person who created them, but it’s always good to see actual records and data, rather than just speculate about what it might look like.
I’m a member of the Staff Council here at CDL, which has recently had a change of leadership. We had a meeting to talk about the direction we want to go in, and how we might revitalize the role of Staff Council here. Our new leaders had a couple of great ideas, and I’m excited to work with them. We just scheduled what will hopefully be the first of many monthly informal lunches, for people to get together and share new things they’re working on, or talk about extra-work hobbies and projects.
The metadata team (well, part of it, anyway) met up to talk about things we learned at ALA and things that are going on in the wider UC cataloging and metadata world. We ranted a little bit about OCLC. It was a good meeting.
I spent too much time troubleshooting a piece of Adobe trial software I was trying to install. I won’t talk about that anymore because it was extremely frustrating.
And finally, I’ve been participating in the Code Year project, which has been awesome so far. I haven’t been able to spend as much time on it this week as I’d like, but I’m hoping to finish up the Week Four lessons this weekend. I love being able to work on this over a sustained period of time: In the past, when I’ve tried to teach myself new programming languages and improve my existing skills, I haven’t maintained momentum. Being sent lessons to work on weekly keeps me driven and moving forward, and it is awesome. And I feel like I’m really learning it: In the past, I’ve learned something quickly, and then just as quickly forgotten it. I think it might be sticking this time!
It’s been a busy week, and it’s proving to be a busy Friday already. I was planning to take lunchtime break to go to the gym, but I think I’ll have to go after work instead. But in my world, it’s always better to be too busy than not busy enough.