I can’t plan beyond the end of the day beyond accepting meeting invites for next month and scheduling some myself. Long-term planning in a public-sector position dependent on open-source software development cycles was an amusing proposition in the Before Time and now it feels somewhat meaningless but nevertheless I/we try.
Mita Williams inspires me to write in small chunks again. Here are some things that have happened not this week, but in the last period of time that feels like a week.
- Assembled a dream panel for the online Access Conference (the GOAT): Logistics: the people and technologies that manage our stuff, with Max Bowman, Gillian Byrne, Mike Campbell, and Dustin McMurphy. Really happy that the virtual environment allowed us all to be a part of it.
- Academic librarians: are we staff or faculty? I have unpopular feelings. I will not be called a class traitor or a management stooge as a result.
- Organized a bunch of events through the Open Repositories Working Group, in which a bunch of disconnected people who do work like mine, all alone, get together to excitedly discuss the most inside-baseball shit in a support group setting. Ugh, I hate to admit that work would be a little easier these days if I was a capable French speaker.
- Joined the university’s Equity Data Advisory Group.
- Watched Jenny Zhang’s excellent talk at Theorizing the Web, on privacy as a public good.
- Thought a lot about academic freedom. Here’s a smart thing my pal dan wrote about it.
- Barely kept the lights on, drank more beer than usual, slept.