Tomorrow’s plan
Heading down to campus tomorrow to work on this annotated-bibliography thing. I’ll be happiest if it’s done at the end of the day, but I’ll settle for whacking a sufficiently large hole in it. Did my initial DIALOG searches tonight; tomorrow is for chasing stuff down, reading it, annotating the good ones, and noting cites to do “who cited this?” checks on if I don’t find enough good articles from the first searches. (Social SciSearch. It’s the stuff, you bet.)
I note with no small amusement that I’m going to use the paper journals rather than full-text online whenever possible—yes, me, Ms. Electronic Text. I know where all the journals are in the SLIS library; they’re in a very small physical space. I can haul the Silver Surfer to campus, dig up and flip through dozen print articles off my DIALOG list, and annotate the good ones in much less time than it typically takes to navigate umpteen bloody database screens to get to full-text.
What this says about database interface design will be left as an exercise for the librarians and vendors among us. (Somebody please kick H.W. Wilson in tender spots until they streamline that horrible web interface they’ve got. Hint one: Frames are bad. Hint two: I like to do a lot of searches at once and then save the articles I find in separate Firefox tabs, because it’s more time-efficient than than the search-read-search-read grind. Javascript links make this all but impossible. Don’t use them. Thanks.)
Should probably also start costing out materials for the LAN design project, because that’s the big hurdle to writing it up and getting it out of my life. It should also let me ballpark an estimate for the budget discussion I have to put the finishing touches on.
The Minnesota talk is looming large, too. I think that’ll be Thursday’s project. I know the kinds of things I want to say—I just need to back it up. (And everyone should be happy to know that there will be no PowerPoint. There will probably be a handout or quickie Web page with bibliography, however.)
I note with a slight tinge of hope, however, that I’ve got my assignments done through the end of next week (except for minor amounts of budget verbiage that are no big deal). If I finish the bibliography, that gets me safely through ACRL, and if I finish the LAN design project, that plus one more search problem-set gets me through the Montreal meeting.
I may survive this semester after all.