A good week
I had an oddly productive week at work this week. I’m not complaining, seeing as how most weeks I walk home thinking “what am I doing here, why can’t I get anything done, and what bloody use am I to anybody anyway?”
(Yeah. It’s just about that bad, most weeks. Have I mentioned that being a repository-rat is an uncommonly demoralizing job? I have? Oh, good.)
This week was not like that. This week I was included on a lunch with not one but two associate deans, and I managed to say reasonably intelligent things and plug not just the repository, not just my colleagues’ work on the scholarly-communication committee, but also a nascent ETD effort that I’m (miraculously) quite hopeful about.
This week the repo passed 7000 items. And yeah, I got a shrug and a mumble about that from a high-level library administrator, and yeah, that’s uncommonly demoralizing, but still—I did it, it’s done, and now I can work on the next thousand. (Eight hundred and fifty-some, actually.) What’s better is that even by the Les Carr metric, I am improving. More stuff is trickling in from more people at more campuses. Holy hell, it has been a slow process, but something is happening.
This week I introduced the repo to a colleague in the library. Here I am actually going to praise DSpace: starting from nothing, I had a new community and collection up, a new eperson added and assigned submitter rights, and the first item ingested with her watching, within about twenty minutes. She now (in her own words) “gets what the repository is about” and will be an advocate. I couldn’t be happier about that.
And this week I finally made enough noise to make a dent in the DSpace development process. Having been more or less dared to put my effort where my kvetches are, I started an ad-hoc, informal “hey, DSpace repo managers; let’s get together and talk about stuff” process—and what the hell do you know, people got together and talked about stuff. Not a huge wave of people, but given the disaffection toward the DSpace development process I’ve seen, twenty people giving up an hour for an online chat is pretty damn decent. With a little bit of luck, the numbers will grow over time, a coherent user constituency will arise that devs will have no choice but to listen to, and DSpace and its long-suffering userbase will be better for it. I’ll drink to that.
My other hat at the moment is my teaching hat, and that has kicked into high gear this week too, seeing as how they’ve GONE AND FILLED UP MY CLASS OMGWTFBBQ. Yeah. Um, sorry. Slightly nervous about this. More than slightly. For one thing, I think the buzz for my class has probably outstripped my ability to deliver. For another, what worked with eleven students is going to be a struggle for forty. (FORTY. OMGWTFBBQ.) I think I have a syllabus that will work, and thanks to Jason Griffey, the final project is much, much better than last year’s… but we’ll see. I hope people don’t think I walk on water, because sploosh.
There’s a whole ’nother can of worms about teaching, involving rules intended to prevent the exploitation of adjuncts which actually prevent anything like “clinical faculty” from existing, but bah, I’m tired and ambivalent about the whole thing anyway and not going to explain it right now. Suffice to say this may be the last time I get to teach the class… but it may not be, either. Gears are grinding, wheels are turning, and all I can do is teach the best I can and await the outcome.
On the whole, though? A good week.