Library
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Day in review Sept 9, 2015
The workday began well enough. I spent some time fixing my citation managment database for the meta-analysis that I am involved in. I am thrilled to say that the working relationship between the PI and I is good. So far, he has been prompt in conversations and responding to email. He has been clear in his communications, deadlines, and goals. The tenor of the relationship has been positive and one of equals. Not bad for a first run. The next month will be heavy on work, but worth it do get it done. I hope to have the majority of it done by the end of the year. The pilot…
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Day in review Friday August 28, 2015
The end of the week. I have two more instruction sessions next week. Today was unexpectedly good. The student were animated and willing to participate. It was more than I expected on a Friday afternoon immediately after lunch. And I finally got to get some scheduling done, until the end of the semester, for the data management project that I am shepherding. This said, I started to realize yesterday that I have the habit, probably formed from my other jobs, to do only short term planning. I need to develop the habit of long term planning. Further, I need to develop a cycle in planning. I had the conceptual idea…
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End of the week
I’m exhausted. Today was back to back teaching, administering a pre-survey for a research project, and a meeting for reviewing data on another research project. Next week doesn’t look much better. Overall, I;m kind of in a work hole. I have it piled up all around me and I need to dig my way out. I’m going to get myself a chicken sandwich, go home, and probably watch a movie. I’ll have to get some work done tomorrow, but it doesn’t happen that often. I probably won’t get truly dug out for a while. I need to keep chipping away at it. Enough for now.
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First orientation with data managment done
Today is the first of a series of orientations. My colleges are in session and classes start on Monday. I have spend some serious time since RDAP thinking of how to incorporate an introduction to data managment into their sessions. Conceptually I thought this was important because I wanted the seed of these practices, and the ways we could support them in this effort to be there in the begining. The harder part was figuring out what to cut. I already have a full plate with a basic orientation to accessing materials, and I usually hit PubMed pretty hard since that is their main database. Typical session send them thorugh a…
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Day in Review May 12, 2015
It’s been a mix of a day. It started with the death of a pet, one of our mice, that has been struggling for a bit. She had been fighting dermatitis to the point of extremem self harm. If I were in the lab, I would have ended her life for various reasons, mostly scientific. But at home she is a beloved pet. We got past the dermatitis and waaaas starting to regrow hair, but there was a patch of skin on her leg that was severly damaged. We had a couple of interventions because of dehydration. She was underweight. But overall, we felt that the worst was over and…
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Day in review June 16, 2015
Wednesday has become my day of sleep. I get to the middle of the week and my energy flags, productivity goes down, and basic tasks can take all day. On top of that, today my stomach didn’t like the rice noodles I tried to feed it for a snack. I haven’t felt ill, but something isn’t right. Today work wrapped up a couple of projects I had been working on. Each was different aspects of the same proposal. The first part landed in mine and a colleague’s lap five weeks ago. We were tasked with updating a previous document on information seeking behaviors of clinician’s of all types. We then…
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Day in review June 9, 2015
The beginning of the day went well. Research was tedious because it was data gathering. I had a hard time paying attention and will have to do some coding and cleaning of the data before I can use it. I truly had no idea how many different types of degrees and certificates can be offered. Evaluating each of these programs takes a certain amount of discernment that I hadn’t anticipated, but it is slowing me down. There will be a lot of data to play with when I’m done. I hope that it will yield some meaningful connections to the library. I fear I may need to learn some scripting/coding…
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Monday problems
Today I got back to the meta-analysis that I was working on. I reviewed my notes and my original search structure. Next was adapting it to the vocabulary of the next database. The run produced similar results in terms of numbers. Unfortunately, I was stumped by the inability to save or export the list in an RIS format. I left it hanging while I went to a faculty meeting. When I got back, I had a sympathetic, but overall unhelpful customer service agent at Elsevier. She couldn’t do anything for me. The only explanation I got was a “system-wide” outage that hadn’t been resolved. The recommended that clear the cache,…
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Day in review June 5, 2015
Friday, today, ended in a meeting. The day started with a meeting too. Everything in between was a mash of email maintenance and opportunity. By the end of today, I realized that I will be working on four papers, if not five. It really makes me wish I was on the tenure clocka bit, becuae there is the possibility that these won’t count for me. I doesn’t matter. I am taking the opportunities that are in front of me. Right now I feel as if I am saying “yes” to everything. Not sustainable in the long term, but good for now in the sense that I have little to lose.…
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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…