Library Web Chic

I’ve been reading some great posts about what people like Ross Singer, Lorcan Dempsey, Dan Chudnov, Art Rhyno and Peter Binkley are doing and thinking about in terms of innovating library web sites and services. In particular the commentary of from Access 2005 has been quite inspiring. There are so many great ideas that I would like to implement or try out here.

The only problem is that we are not ready. We are so far from ready to do some of these things it is scary. We still have to deal with content management issues and serious issues with site usability. If I’m lucky it will take a year to handle the current set of outstanding issues with the site. If I’m unlucky it could take a lot longer. To make matters worse while we are trying to catch up, everyone else and technology will be moving ahead. That thought by itself is rather daunting and depressing. However, if we don’t try to catch up in rapid fashion the Libraries’ web site will perpetually behind. So I’ve set an ambitious, if not reckless, timeline up knowing that if we meet it there will only be even more work to do when we are done.

At times like these I miss Cortland, not because it was inherently better, but because I would be at a different starting point. I would be working on different things, many of which I’d never done before. Being at University of Houston means starting from scratch again. Everything I accomplished at Cortland is left behind. This is both good and bad. It is good because my past mistakes don’t haunt me and bad because I don’t have laurels here to rest on and I am still learning the system both tehcnological and political. Moving on I’m realizing is very much a double-edge sword.

While I miss familar technologies, infrastructure, people (gosh I miss the people), and all the great things I did, my job is a lot less stressful here. I go home at night and do not obsess about the problems that I could not solve at work. I don’t lose sleep over the fact that I cannot possibly get everything done and it is all on me to make sure things stay working. I don’t have a love/hate relationship with my job anymore.

I’m pretty sure that I’m not less stressed because University of Houston is a better place to work, but rather I’m less stressed because somehow in the last four years I’ve professionally matured. I pushed my self to the edge in the past and as many wonderful things I got to do because of that, it wasn’t healthy. My experiences have taught me there will always be more to do; that there will be aspects of my job I dislike and like; that the world isn’t always fair; that if you are compentent and let alone talented you will get given piles of stuff to do; and that I truly need to pace myself if I don’t want to hate my job, lose my mind, or become supremely depressed.

That being said, all I can do is keep the ball moving, maybe that means that some people will find what I’m doing boring or out of step with the latest and greatest technologies. But the bottom line is you have to start somewhere to even begin to get the job done. So bit by bit it will get better. I have my blog entries, conference presentations, and publications to remind me that that’s how things got done at Cortland too.