Famous (and true!) words from a colleague at a nearby university. It has been months since I have posted anything on account of feeling tired, overwhelmed, and pretty much unenthused about professional matters. But, of recent note:
- Scott Plutchak spoke at a conference I attended. He didn’t say anything earthshakingly radical, but he did identify the present day as the most exciting era, information-wise, since the time of Gutenberg. True. Sometimes I lose my sense of wonder about how much is possible now.
- I attended a statewide virtual meeting of a working group via iChat. The group included one member that none of the rest of us (who have been working together for a year) has ever met in person. Then we saved the whole chat for future reference. Awesome! We don’t have any urgent projects at the moment, but we parsed out some future projects and verified that chat was a viable environment for a meeting. Although it is somewhat less cool, text may be preferable to video chat which seems to have some latency issues. We also determined that we <3 ETDs, XML, and wikis and are a bunch of major nerds.
- I’m back on the case on the EAD/MARC transform. It’s pretty nifty so far and I’m amazed that by spending some time fiddling with X, I’ll ultimately be able to turn A into Z in milliseconds, with total reliability. It’s slow going so far because I’m not as good at manipulating XML as I should be and I’m still learning my way around the new editor, but I really want to complete this piece of the project without enlisting the web guru!
Some days I really <3 my job…
