I love to write – formally or casually. What I don’t really enjoy is the research. That’s where casual writing is head and shoulders above formal writing.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading articles and books, I do. It’s that I have to hone in on a specific topic which can be difficult. Have you ever thought you had a great idea and then couldn’t find any supporting documentation? I had that happen this time. Rod’s thoughts on a racism carnival got me to thinking about racism in libraries. I’ve seen mentions of it in other courses and readings, but I couldn’t find any articles specifically addressing it. I sure couldn’t find any studies. Now if I were a real researcher and not just someone who synthesizes information, that might be a good topic to latch on to. I returned to my original topic after running into a dead end on that one. Then I went down another rabbit trail – copyright studies. But there was too much information on that. Although it’s good to have a back up topic. Back to the original.
Now the original topic was (*ahem* is) on budgeting in libraries when there are budget cuts. What has to go and what has to stay? Who has to go and who gets to stay? I was really excited about it a week ago, but now I’m a little ho-hum. That’s ok. I can write about it anyway and may regain some of that earlier enthusiasm as I read in order to write.
I also have been trying to work with open source office to highlight/comment on the pdf documents of articles. It’s a little awkward and doesn’t work on scanned documents. I’m thinking nothing probably works on scanned documents. This is not the time to be figuring this out – with deadlines looming. I wanted to do something besides print all these articles/chapters that I may or may not use.
Ball game tonight. I’ll leave it all and stew on it . . .
Jack Of All Trades 