Nine days out of the office was enough that I stopped dreaming about work and by Saturday, while I was still struggling to remember what day it was (note to self, it was “go to M&M’s open house day”) I noticed I was starting to be excited about the idea of To-Do lists and upcoming projects.

2018 promises already to be a busy year, kicking off this week with in-person interviews for a colleague who retired last summer. Here’s what is on deck so far:

  • I’m the Project Manager an ARL SPEC Kit on Library Analytics with a focus on patron privacy and data handling. My team is 7 institutions and they have been a joy to work with thus far. We launch the survey in late March and the late spring and early summer should bring us a wealth of data.
  • My first for-credit class that is all by me! I was approved to teach LIB 573: Intro to Research Data Management at the 11:59th of last semester. This 8-week course will launch in March and is the University Library’s first foray into hosting our own graduate courses. So far, three people have registered!
  • The usual courses I teach in the spring semester: two for Dentistry and one for the PhD in Informatics program. Those are already built and we did some refreshing of content at the end of last fall.
  • Submission of my first IMLS grant! I’m Co-I on the project and my PI has been doing a masterful job wrangling together all of the details. We received generous and thoughtful feedback and really high preliminary scores, so I’m encouraged.  We’ll hear those results in May (right about the time I get SPEC kit data….)
  • I’m organizing an accepted panel on Library Analytics/Patron Privacy for ALA 2018. See you in NOLA.
  • A research project Rebecca and I are leading on Nursing PhD/DNP programs and Research Data Management was accepted for MLA 2018; she’ll be there to present.
  • I’m hoping to be in Montreal for IASSIST; waiting to hear about a panel and a paper.
  • I’ll be at RDAP 2018, helping with local arrangements, dine arounds, and I led keynote planning. Can’t wait to see all of my Data colleagues; I really missed them last year.

Except for the course (“except” hahahahahahaha) all of these are team projects and while I’m integral, I’m poking around a bit to try to sort out what my next major thing is.  I have several ideas floating around but many of them feel nebulous. I would also like to do more continuing education for myself this year; I am trying to stay highly rut averse.

And I want to write more. I say that every year and it’s perennially true. I’m happiest when I write frequently: blogs, journals, papers, and more. So I’ll continue to see ways to do more of that more regularly.

Happy New Year!