repositories for the rest of us: CC:DA, RDA and my vacation thus far

2007/06/28: CC:DA, RDA and my vacation thus far

I'm glad that Meredith, and others have brought up the issue of staying sane. Librarian life can be stressful. There are reasons I sought such a long break between gigs. I need to decompress. I let myself get overworked, discouraged, run-down in the past few months and I owe to myself to regain my health. My first month of vacation has been hectic and not quite the respite I need.

Part of regaining my health involves getting s**t done. There's a bathroom and bedroom to be painted and a home office needing a purge. I've been drinking the David Allen Kool-Aid so I'm going through all the steps of integrating those time management principles into my life. The idea is to get all those unfinished niggly things out of the way so I don't stress about them. I haven't gotten very far with the niggly things yet because I've been busy with gadgets, CC:DA work, culinary school, and ALA travel.

I lucked into a bit of money and was able to procure a MacBook and upgrade my cell phone to a Treo -- I'm hoping it will help me implement GTD. So far, it's just been yet-more-stuff-to-learn. The MacBook is (oestensibly) for my daughter. She has graciously allowed me to abscond with it for a couple of months. I've been geeking out installing a bunch of open source software and learning my way around Appledom. As a bonus, it's good for practicing the techbootcamp unix cheat sheet commands (password=library). It is not a bonus for getting sh**t done. Evaluating and installing software takes time. Especially when your software installations fail because you didn't know to drag the installer to the application folder to do the installation. Nothing like beginning with a new operating system to humble one's-self. Add another new OS (Palm) to the mix and one really needs to get into the groove of beginner's mind. My struggles to learn new tech have been ongoing since the day I left MFPOW.

My first few days off were spent with virtual colleagues writing the preliminary report of the CC:DA Task Force on Internal and External Communication. I was hoping to write more about RDA ch.3. I haven't forgotten my promises to comment. I just have trouble finding dedicated time for writing coherently. See the part above re: stressing myself out. Task force deadlines have trumped analysis and opinion pieces for the blog. I can't even keep up with NGC4LIB. In the interest of staying sane, I hereby renege on my promises and add a very weak, "what they said!" to the others who have already very ably commented on Ch.3.

Speaking of getting sh**t done, CC:DA has the most work of any committee upon which I've ever served. I've been getting to know the history and purpose of CC:DA committee quite well during my participation on the TF. That is worth blogging about. I sense a bit of a disconnect between our purpose and our work. I've added it to my tickler file. I spent the better part of June madly reading all of the paperwork coming from the JSC and attending culinary school in Ft. Bragg, CA. I've now got two courses towards my certification as a raw vegan chef under my belt.

I'm working on house and personal stuff so I can make space for all this writing I'm not doing. I have lots of opinions about the RDA scope document update and the various goings on. Right now, however, it's all I can do to keep up with the reading and committee voting stuff. ALA was its typical mad blur of meetings and travel. I'm happy to (finally) be back at home, even if only for a brief respite.

I'll be driving cross-continent and cycling the Underground RR with the wife and kid for the last half of July/early August so posts are likely to be intermittent. There will be a lot of RDA stuff coming down the pipe for me to review for CC:DA, so that will form the bulk of my time online along with continuing to learn about my new Mac/Palm personal computing environment.

I really need to do better at doing nothing with my vacation time.

Labels: CC:DA, RDA