what i did on my summer vacation

maura @ 8:30 am

Yesterday was the last week of summer hours at my job, when we work extra on Mondays through Thursdays and get Fridays off. Other than vacations I’ve been using my Summer Fridays to work on my research project, but yesterday I took the day off. I did some chores and errands, then Jonathan and I took advantage of the Gus-at-camp time to go see a matinee of Inception (which totally lived up to the hype, imho).

This has been a grumpy summer for me, scholarly work-wise. Mostly the problem is that I can’t help comparing it to the past two summers. Two years ago I spent the summer analyzing a small data set and writing it up into an article with a colleague. Last summer I wrote an article all by my lonesome, which I’m happy to report was just published. And even last semester, which was totally busy, another colleague and I wrote an article that we submitted to a journal earlier this summer.

This summer my main work has been writing up a preliminary report on the research project I’m working on with a colleague. I finished a first draft of the data from my site this week, and at 20 pages (single-spaced!) it’s definitely something real and tangible, the product of my summer. Absolutely I’m proud of it, and the project, too, which I love and believe has real value. But at the same time I can’t help feeling like it’s somehow less than my work in previous summers.

I’m heading into my 3rd year in my job so there’s still another 4 long years until I come up for tenure. I try not to freak out about it too much; it’s still a while out, and I think I’m in pretty good shape. But it’s sometimes it’s hard not to worry. The research and publication bar is inching ever higher, and it’s not always clear what’s sufficient. What is clear, of course, is the gold standard: the peer-reviewed journal article, the monograph published by a scholarly press. A preliminary report on research, even a 20-page one, isn’t one of those.

I don’t regret the summer’s work. It needed to happen. Our project continues and expands this coming academic year, and it’s important to get a sense what went well and what didn’t before we dive into data collection again. We’ve identified lots of themes that we’re interested in exploring further in our interviews with faculty and students at our four additional research sites. And this report will serve as a starting point for articles, presentations, etc. we write in the future (and, eventually, a book).

So why am I still so grumpy? A wise friend suggested that it’s a combination of settling into my job (both the librarian and researcher parts of it) and tackling such a big research project. She’s probably gotten it spot on. I love this project, but it is enormous and I am constantly fighting guilt that I’m not paying as much attention to it as I should be. There’s big things, like coding transcripts from all 82 interviews we did this past year and entering the data into our qualitative analysis software. There’s little things, like writing the reports for the IRB that approved and grant that funded last year’s work. At any given moment there is something I could be working on related to this project.

Which I guess is my task for this year: making progress on the project in a sustainable way. With an article in our sights, even if it’s not right now.

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a sad confession

maura @ 9:57 pm

I’ve had my laptop for over a year now, and have been proud to have very little closed, corporate software installed. A few smallish applications here and there — e.g., BBEdit, Omnigraffle — all fully purchased, thank you very much. But I’d avoided the big evil: Microsoft Office. Instead I went with OpenOffice, the open source, freely available word processing/spreadsheet/presentation software alternative.

The interface is a little clunky, but I’ve gotten used to it by now and I know which menu options have all of the tools I commonly use. Sometimes there’s a bit of weirdness moving files between OpenOffice on my home machine and Word on my PC at work, but it’s not that big of a deal. Usually it’s just on the order of bullets being replaced with little checkboxes or something similarly innocuous. The bullets print out okay so I figure all’s well that ends well.

There is one quite significant stumbling block with OpenOffice though, and that’s the presentation software. No matter how hard I try, bad things seem to happen when I move a file back and forth between OpenOffice presentation and PowerPoint. Backgrounds disappear, fonts go wacky, I can’t print the slides in Notes view, that sort of thing. For the past year I’ve managed this mostly by creating all of my presentations at work using PowerPoint, since it’s pretty much guaranteed that any computer I’ll need to use for a presentation will have PP and not OO. But this weekend I hit the wall with that strategy. I’m giving a presentation at the end of the week, and it’s a long enough talk that I really need to be able to create my slides while I’m at home. The presentation is at a conference, and I realized yesterday that I’m just not willing to leave things to chance by using OpenOffice to make my slides.

So I installed Microsoft Office on my machine yesterday. The whole kit + kaboodle, even Entourage (does anyone even use that? what the heck does it even do?).

It makes me feel low. I wanted to stick with the open source stuff. I hate the MS monopoly. But then I realized that I hadn’t even gotten away from it when I was relying solely on OpenOffice: I never once saved a file in the native OpenOffice format. Every file I have is saved as a .doc or a .xls, which I needed to do so I could use the files at work as well as at home. I was locked in to the closed source system without even using the applications.

Now I’m part of the MS matrix again, sigh. Except that the joke’s on me, in two ways:

1. The interface for the Mac version of Word is significantly different than for the PC version, so I’m kind of lost when it comes to menu options.

2. Word and Excel display with such a high resolution that I need to increase the view size to comfortably compose text. I hate it when I get docs from folks who have the view cranked up to 150%, now I know why they do it!

I guess I will get used to these new “features.” But in the meantime I am still using OpenOffice to view .doc and .xls files. Old habits, etc.

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i’m kinda busy

maura @ 10:54 pm

Recently not one but two completely unrelated people asked me about archaeology. Specifically they asked if I ever thought of getting back into archaeological research. I guess I’d be lying if I said I don’t think about it sometimes. I read news stories about new discoveries with interest, and whenever we go to the AMNH or anyplace at all historic I bore my family with any archaeological details I happen to know. And there is one chapter in my dissertation that I might be able to convert into an article someday. I wouldn’t say that I’m incredibly interested in heading back out to the field (and definitely not back to the lab), but there are lots of other archaeological research topics to consider.

But I’ve got lots of other research plates spinning right now, and not a lot of time for new stuff. There’s my big research project, which has a pile of data to analyze and more on the way (I started student research process interviews this week). And I’m working on an article with another colleague. And I’ve spent some time this semester developing a game to teach students about evaluating information, which I’ll be presenting at a conference in June and probably trying to write up somewhere. And I’ve got a couple of other ideas floating around, too.

Time is always the issue. I’m a greedy time junkie — I crave more time the way shopaholics can’t wait for their next consumer fix. It’s not that I want to do less librariany stuff to fit in more research. I love the librarian parts of my job, and I’m still totally thrilled to be teaching our new course this semester. If anything I want more time for that stuff, too. And family stuff and leisure stuff and and and…

Maybe I should stop reading. Clearly that’s part of the problem. Reading leads to new ideas, and new ideas lead to yearning for time for implementation. Literacy: the hidden dark side!

(Or, of course, I could always just relax a bit.)

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ha! bet you thought i’d forgotten

maura @ 10:46 pm

But no, I was just working on my poster for tomorrow’s faculty poster session. Which is almost done, just needs the final constructing before work tomorrow.

It is, late, though, and I’m still nursing this head cold (which has stayed at the low-level annoyance phase, thankfully). So here are a few pictures that struck me as funny. Because part of this research project is asking students to take photos of various objects/locations. And one of the photos is “the night before a big assignment is due.” And that’s where I’m at, tonight. So here’re my photos:

I should probably take a picture of the whole poster tomorrow, too, huh?

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grab your skeleton key

maura @ 9:34 pm

Today I had RT* and worked on a poster for my research project that I’m giving at the faculty poster session later this week. I’ve done posters before, but not since I’ve gotten all ethnographic with this qualitative study I’m working on right now, and it’s been a bit weird to make this poster. I mean, my old archaeology self was really comfortable with posters. Charts + graphs? Check. Photos of the site or the faunal remains? Check. Brief bullets w/salient data points and conclusions? Check.

* Reassigned Time, boon to the jr faculty member, in which I do all much** of the research + publication that will (I hope) eventually earn me tenure + promotion someday.

** Because I have my Morning Writing Time, too.

But this poster is different. First off, these are only preliminary results — no final conclusions yet (though they’re interesting enough to make the poster feasible). Stranger to me is that I don’t have any charts and graphs. No charts and graphs! I feel a bit naked.

It’s been harder than I thought it would be to recreate a narrative on the poster (this is the project, here’s why we’re doing it, here’s what we’ve done so far, and this is what the interviewees said). I’ve pulled out a few interesting quotes and highlighted them in blue. I’m using Creative Commons-licensed photos from Flicker to illustrate the salient points, e.g. a big twisty clock for the “students have many demands on their time” point. And, I sheepishly admit to using a bit of clipart, too (hey Flickr, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if you had more photos of people of color).

Is there going to be enough info there without my friends the Charts and their neighbors the Graphs? Tomorrow I have to pick up the posterboard, so we’ll see how it turns out.

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engulfed

maura @ 9:30 pm

Earlier Gus asked Jonathan what “engulfed” means, and since I was thinking I’d write a little something about my research project today that seems as good a title as any.

This year a colleague (at another library) and I got a small grant to do an ethnographic study of the ways that students at each of our colleges research and complete their school assignments and projects. It’s modeled after a similar study done at the University of Rochester a few years ago (here’s a PDF of the book they wrote about it). We’re interviewing faculty about their expectations for student work, and also doing a couple of different kinds of interviews with students.

Working on this project has been a blast so far. We started with faculty interviews at the end of the spring and over the summer. But it’s gotten a bit intense over the past few weeks since the student interviews started. Right now I’m in the throes of 2 kinds of interviews with students. One is called a mapping diary — I give each student a map of our campus and of the transit system and ask them to trace and log (with times) the course of a typical school day. The other is called a photo survey — I give each student a disposable camera and ask them to take pictures of different objects and locations, e.g., where they study, what they carry in their school bag, etc. With both of these I’m asking students to meet with me after they’ve finished for between 10-30 minutes so that I can interview them to expand on what they recorded on their maps/photos.

We’ve got enough funding for 10 students to participate in each kind of study. It’s been a bit more challenging than I’d anticipated keeping track of everything: which students have come to pick up their maps/cameras, dropped them off, and scheduled interviews. I’m running cameras to the drugstore to get developed and buying Metrocards in different denominations (as payment to the students for participating in the interviews). When I posted the flyers to recruit students for the study I had such an overwhelming response that I actually had to go around campus and take them down 4 days later! Which is all great, just a bit of a challenge on top of all of the usual life + work stuff.

Thank goodness for RT! Reassigned time, the saving grace of the junior faculty member. Tomorrow I’ve got an RT day scheduled and have 4 students meeting me for interviews. Then somebody has a birthday (and will finally be as old as me), and we all get cake. Huzzah!

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the monkeys chatter away the hours

maura @ 9:42 pm

Tonight after dinner I said, “wouldn’t it be nice to have some decaf?” And Jonathan countered with, “how about half-caf?” I wavered for a minute but then thought, “what the hey,* it’s Friday, w00t!” And that’s why I’ll be using even! more! exclamation! points! than! usual! Hope it will not come back to haunt me in the form of insomnia later on tonight.

* There are very few work-related things that I will complain about (because you all know that I <3 my job), but one is this: on Friday afternoons it is impossible to get a cup of coffee. The bookstore closes at 1, and today even the cafeteria had stopped serving food + beverages by the time I got down there. They do have a coffee vending machine but I just can’t pay money for that stuff. Bah. So I guess I felt entitled to the extra caffeine tonight, too.

This was a pretty good week. Yesterday a student came into the library specifically asking for me! And I was able to help her, and she was grateful! (I’m a sucker for appreciative students, what can I say.) I was pretty good at keeping resolutions this week, too, though I did think of about 5 more work-related things that I could add to my list. But I didn’t add them! (yet) And maybe I won’t!

I got a fair amount of work done on my research day, too, though 2 article ideas are still muddled. I’m thinking that I might need to blag about them to try and iron them out. I’ve never really wanted to blag about library stuff here, but lately I am mulling it over and I don’t know where else I would do it so you might have to suffer through it at some point. I can barely keep up with this blag so I’m certainly not starting another.

And then there’s the tenure thing…should I be spending creative time writing something that will not “count” for tenure? I tend to be of the opinion that any writing is good writing, but it’s hard to keep nagging tenure concerns out of the back of my head. Of course, by the time I come up for tenure it’ll be 2015 and we’ll all have wearable computers with instant peer-review and flying cars, so I probably shouldn’t sweat it now.

Maybe I should try to wrangle an invite to join a group library blag somewhere. The academic library association has a blag and they put out a call for first year academic librarian blaggers last summer, but I decided not to apply because I was worried about the workload. But now I’m thinking that I should have because it looks like each one only writes about one post/month, if that. And I could totally manage that.

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when you walk down the street

maura @ 9:50 am

Ah, Summer Fridays. The days I’ve scheduled for publication-related activities. Last week I had a good workday, but today I am far less motivated. I’m still not 100% recovered from my surprisingly evil head cold. And I feel like I didn’t get enough done this week, what with the 2 sick days. I guess I did finish two books while convalescing (one of which had been moldering on a shelf, half-read, since the spring!). But I’d like to have gotten more done at work, run some errands, cleared out some Coop work, etc.

(Yes, I know it’s not healthy to regret time lost to illness. I’m working on it.)

So, today I would much rather be doing non-publication-related things. But there’s not an infinite number of Summer Fridays, so instead I’ve planned procrastination until 10am (hence this post!) and work after that.

(So here’s the real post now, that was all just explanatory blathering that you’re free to ignore. Oops, too late.)

Two shiny new gadgets arrived in our house this week.

I know, I know, I’ve claimed at least twice that I would not be getting one. BUT, someone in the house joined the iphone developer’s program and needed a testing platform. Also, our old cellphones were really bad, practically unusable, and since our contract was up we would have needed to pay for new phones AND get a more expensive contract anyway since they no longer offer our old plan. And it’s not fair for just ONE person in the house to have an iphone, now, is it?

Admittedly, it still makes me a bit nervous to carry it around. I did bring my old ipod shuffle to work the other day because it seemed conspicuous to be listening to music on the iphone in the subway. But I have to admit that it’s pretty sweet. I stitched up a quickie cozy for it out of some felt I had lying around, but I’ve plans to sew a real case sometime soon. And the headphones fit perfectly into the little knitted cozy that Anne made for me ages ago (thanks Anne!).

I haven’t paid for any software for it yet, but I downloaded a free Othello, because I am a nerd. Now if someone could just make a (GOOD!) listmaking app and Tesserae, I’ll be all set!

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