Author Archives: Lisa McAulay

Week of DH

I think we need a week of DH instead of a Day! It hasn’t been a terribly interesting set of blog posts from me so far, but I think I’ll just expand on all the things mentioned throughout the day in a set of follow-up posts. And I really can’t wait to actually read through everyone else’s posts.

Late Afternoon – Action Items, Clean Up

It’s 3:46pm, and we’ve finished our meeting and I’ve made a cup of tea. I wish it were coffee, but I don’t have coffee supplies in the office, and I don’t want to take the time to go out to get coffee.

Handwritten notes from our programming meeting today.

Handwritten notes from our programming meeting today.

 

Now I’ve got notes in my notebook from the meeting. Some of these I’m about to turn into tickets in Jira and then I’m hoping to have a little time to clear my desk and get my thoughts in order.

Midday Stop and Reconfigure

It’s 12:30 and I’ve yet to accomplish much. My email has been building up since 7:30 this morning. So, it’s time to look at the calendar in Outlook and see what lies ahead. We have our big weekly meeting at 2 and I think I promised someone I would put together an agenda. This meeting we loosely call the DL Programming Meeting. At UCLA, the Digital Library Program consists of three librarians: myself, Jen Weintraub, and Stephen Davison. Then inside the Developers unit of the Digital Initiatives and Information Technology department there are four dedicated DL programmers. So, every Monday afternoon for 1 to 2 hours we meet and talk about what we’re all doing. Most recently we usually talk about our deployment of Islandora and our co-development with Discovery Garden, Inc. (aka DGI). DGI is the software company that does Islandora development and they’re located on Prince Edward Island in Canada. That’s four time zones ahead of us! We meet with DGI every Tuesday morning via Google hangout. So, on Monday afternoons we usually plan what we want to talk about with them.

So, my task now is to jot down any of the things that were discussed casually last week at each others’ desks that we want to talk about during our meeting. I know I told Kristian I would put a few things on the agenda, but I can’t yet remember what those things were. We use Confluence as our documentation tool here, so that’s where I’ll go to put together the agenda and email the link out to the rest of crew.

And I need to get lunch. I brought some bread in, but I forgot my cottage cheese at home. So, I have to run down to the local student eating area and grab something.

Sluggish

Okay, I am not the most efficient blogger. I haven’t done much today and I haven’t written much on this blog either. I think the rest of this crowd is way better at this than I am!

Photographs of the Morning

Entrance to YRL, the Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, on the morning of Monday, April 8, 2013

Entrance to YRL, the Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, on the morning of Monday, April 8, 2013

I went to the Research Library (affectionately known on campus as YRL) for my coffee this morning. This is what it looked like on the way in.

 

The current exhibit in the entryway of YRL is "Off the Shelf: Medieval Manuscripts and the Aesthetics of the Past." This is an image of the letter "Y" in a fancy reprint of Chaucer's ABCs.

The current exhibit in the entryway of YRL is “Off the Shelf: Medieval Manuscripts and the Aesthetics of the Past.” This is an image of the letter “Y” in a fancy reprint of Chaucer’s ABCs.

After getting my coffee at the nice “Cafe 451” in YRL, I took a quick browse of the exhibit in the entryway as I left the building. This image is a picture of a book on display, published by what would soon become the Arion Press. I really like it.

So, I think I have a little work to do here. What a mess!

So, I think I have a little work to do here. What a mess!

Yes, I sit in a cubicle, but I tend to call it “my desk.” It’s cubicle-ness is mitigated by having incredible windows. And I don’t mean my computer. Please forgive me for positing something that has that horrid logo in it! I wasn’t thinking of that when I took the picture! So my goal today is to somehow tame this monster.

At the Office

Yes, it’s 11:11AM and my morning is only now getting underway. That’s a bit of a problem. Here’s what’s going on:

  • Delivered daughter to preschool
  • Arrived at UCLA
  • Got coffee
  • Quick browse of the entryway exhibit at the Research Library
  • Went to office
  • Talked with Jen about our XML class
  • Went to the bathroom, and found the spectral imaging team
  • Talked to Stephen Davison, head of the Digital Library Program, who sits next to me
  • Entertained Stephen’s offer to go to the Open Annotation Collaboration rollout at Stanford tomorrow
  • Tried to get Kristian Allen, a DL programmer here, to go to Stanford for the rollout
  • We realize it’s too short notice for any of us to go

Now, I’m going to try to take control of my desk, my work, my projects!

 

Time to Activate

I’m about to begin the action part of my morning. This is when I close out all the windows on the computer and focus on getting myself and my daughter fed, cleaned, dressed, prepared for the day, out the door, and to our respective spots. Between 6:40 and now I dipped into email, grading, and the Day of DH blogs, and I wanted to do more of all of them, which is why I’m already a little behind. I expect I’ll get to my desk at work circa 9:40.

The Day Begins

It’s 6:40, and I’m awake in my apartment while my daughter and husband sleep. I have about 50 minutes left before I need to wake my daughter and start getting her ready for preschool. Now is the sacred time when I try to imagine the day ahead and clear out as much email from my inbox as possible. I will also do some grading for the graduate class I’m co-teaching with Jennifer Weintraub for San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science. It’s a course on XML.

Happily, I don’t have much on my calendar for today, so I should be able to get some okay blogging done. I have been trying to set aside a few blocks of time during this week to catch up on my project management and cleaning my desk. So, I’m hoping today will prove interesting as a blog because I’ll be able to take tiny snapshots of the different things I’m working on. We’ll see.