Day in review May 29, 2015
Good news on the employment front. It looks very good that my contract will be renewed. I’ll be happy when I have the contract in hand, but this is as good as it’s going to get until the budget gets in and things get signed. That said, it feels good that I can focus on planning for the year. Some thing I have been trying to do for a month.
My current time has been taken up with preparing for this weeks lecture and working on the regional NN/LM proposal. I am working with a colleague on this and will be turning in a draft of it on Monday. I probably will need to get some work done on it on the weekend (an unfortunate trend that will be taken care of now that I can plan better). It will be good to have it out of my hair. I also wish I would have gotten more time with it. We have been updating the document with new information seeking literature for clinicians and other professionals. But I feel that we could have more time to really dig at it. Unfortunately, the kind of time I would need is six months and we weren’t given that. And the information we provide will be in a appendix anyway.
Other work was getting started on a couple of reference questions for students. They are always a balancing act to handle. They always come at me with direct requests that are unclear whether or not they expect me to do their searching for them and just provide them with results. In some cases that may be appropriate, but it takes an email or so to determine it. Most of the time, the students are expected to learn to do their own searching as it is part of the research process. I’m glad they are coming to me. It takes a bit of manoevering to get them to understand the ethical limits of libray help.
Next week will be a balancing act of getting things done that have a close due date and getting projects started so that I don’t get to a point where I’m working on everything just before it’s due. I’m ready to get some structure, especially since next Monday officially starts year two for me. I should bring a cake.