Mi Vida Loca

Ok, so I'm enrolled in the CAS in Digital Libraries this semester. What does this mean? Well, for me it means I'm surrounded by interesting projects. I'm taking two classes and working three jobs, because I just couldn't figure out anything that I wanted to drop. This is going to require a phenomenal organizational effort on my part, I suspect. Perhaps it's time to really get down to the nitty-gritty of implementing a GTD system.

My jobs are:

1. Creating code documentation and managing web site updates for the ECHO-DEP digital preservation research and development project. This is my assistantship and I work there about 20 hours a week. Right now I'm trying to make my way through the existing documentation to get up to speed on the project's progress to date. I'm a little nervous about this job, because I'll be the only non-programmer in a group of programmers, and my ability to understand and describe what they're working on is going to be crucial to my ability to do my job. I've done a lot of work before being the middleman between programmers and non-techies, but it's always hard to get up to speed on a new set of acronyms and technologies.
2. The Illinois Newspaper Project. I'm helping to prepare pre-1970 newspapers for microfilming. This involves noting changes in the masthead and other publication data, like where issue numbers were skipped or where pages are missing in the hard copies. They've started me with a Russian newspaper from around the turn of the century. Is this a clever trick to keep the library students from spending all their time reading the newspapers instead of making notes about them?
3. I'm helping organize and populate a wiki for the Champaign Public Library. They have a grant to create a resource for local business people, and so they're creating the website and a series of seminars that will help people get their businesses off the ground. The focus in on local information, and a lot of the information on the site will come from CPL's "Fugitive Facts," a collection of answers to reference questions the library has received over the years. We're launching the website at the end of February, so there's a lot to do before then. Although fortunately we don't have to have everything done when it launches. We can still flesh it out as the semester goes on.

My classes are:

1. 590MDL: Metadata in Theory and Practice. This class should be a huge help with figuring out the ECHO-DEP job. I'm really looking forward to getting a better handle on the different metadata types and when to use them.
2. 590DEL: Design of Digitally Mediated Information Services. This one will talk about the ways in which Web 2.0-ish tools like blogs, wikis, podcasting, and the like can help libraries do their jobs. Should fit in nicely with my CPL job, and there will be the opportunity to work on related projects too.

So yeah, it's going to be a jam-packed semester, but I'm really looking forward to the challenge of it. I just hope that my petition for the University to change my residency status to in-state goes through. I've been living here for 4.5 years, after all, and it's been 2.5 since the last time I was in school. I really don't want to take out any more student loans!