Clean up work and administratia

The last week I’ve spent a significant amount of my time doing clean up work, documentation and policy writing. Part of this is that the staff of Web Services has grown from 3 when I started 3 years to 5 1/2 currently. While that is a great thing, it means that there is a great chance that people will do things differently from one another, information is lost, etc. So I’ve been expanding our documentation quite a bit. Some of it is information internal to Web Services. Some of it is useful to our librarians and staff using our systems. Some of it is rules.

At the same time, I’ve been going through and deleting, cleaning up old code, dropping stored procedures and tables from our database that are not longer used and trying to get a handle on the stuff that isn’t where it should be. Three years in I’m still finding pieces of weirdness that pre-date me. My favorite is intranet content, data, applications on web servers for the public website. We are putting Drupal into place for our intranet so we need to get a handle on this stuff, organize it and move it into the new system. Personally I can’t wait for the new intranet. I’m probably going to put as much stuff there as humanly possible. I like the notion of everything in one place.

The worst part of this job for me is updating the system diagrams. I’m not very adept at drawing so I hate working on these but I seem to have the best handle on what needs updating. To get through this I’m having to take intermittent breaks to not lose my mind. Hopefully once things are cleaned up I can move on to more interesting work, like reading about technical metadata and the API for our digital library system.