Blogger-Naught

I stumbled across my blog the other night by accident and was stunned to see that my last post was more than a year and a half ago. I guess that says something about how busy my life has been lately, since I thought it had just been a few months. I am trying to think of all that has happened in the intervening months and my head HURTS when I begin to think about all that has transpired.

The Past

- I finished my dissertation, and filed it in the late fall of 2009. (Yay!)

- In the fall of 2009 I searched for, found and tried to purchase a lovely old farm house in Michigan.

- In January of 2010 I began teaching for Wayne State University in their School of Library and Information Science. (Of course, since my life is never uncomplicated, I had to go through the court system in PA to get permission to leave the state. Meanwhile the house I mentioned just above -- and the $ that went into the good faith deposit and various and sundry pre-purchase tests for said home -- fell away like leaves falling off a tree in the late winter.)

- Traveling back and forth between PA and MI at least once a month from January until May 2010 was a real treat. This was especially interesting when through some weird twist of luck I wouldn't get the schedule for some WSU events until the day before. Hah!

- In the spring of 2010, after going through the court process, I received word that I would be allowed to leave the state.

- I searched for, found and purchased a home in Michigan. I closed on the house June 15th, 2010.

- I managed to finally get all pertinent services up and running by mid July of 2010. While this factoid would not seem to warrant any discussion, I have to say that in Michigan this is a major undertaking. I must have been on the phone for several hours with each of the service suppliers getting service started, fixed or etc. Truly bizarre -- Nothing like living in a Third World country in the good ole US of A!

- The summer of 2010 was spent trying to get services (hah), and setting up the house. It was a long summer! A number of things with the house had not been cared for and so the crazy work of home ownership began.

- I had to deal with contractors who took care of the yard for the season, others who fixed the garage roof and yet another that replaced several windows in the house.

- Once the academic year started things got truly crazy! I prepared video presentations for one online course, while I developed material for an on-campus course at the same time.

- Then there were the never-ending committee meetings, advising questions, emails from students, research project development, and etc. Without exaggeration I worked between 80-100 hours a week from August until May. I was utterly exhausted by the end, but was very happy to have many wonderful, engaged students this academic year. (Yay, students!)

- During the spring semester I began meeting with a writing partner and I got several articles out the door and published (in process at the moment - both will come out this fall in Art Doc and The Journal of Academic Librarianship. I have another paper that is under pre-submission revision since several items have been written since I originally wrote the paper. It has helped tremendously to be accountable to someone else.

- This spring I gave a paper at ACRL (April 1, 2011), developed one research project on visual literacy among LIS students, and did the data analysis for another research project on museum's use of Flickr that was folded in with a colleague's research and presented just a few days ago in Spain.

The Present

- Today I will finish the revisions on one paper and send it off.

- I have been developing a new version of one of the core courses at WSU. It is what I fondly call the "cataloging lite" course.

- Another course I will teach in the fall, a metadata course, is also being updated over the summer. I am feeling the pressure -- there are only 2 more months before the semester starts!

- Of course there are a gazillion things that are vying for my attention at home. The lawn, the gardens, the pool, the catz, the chickens and their coop. It never ends. I could spend my entire day doing nothing but yard and housework and still not get it all done! Eeeeep.

- I have brought the child unit back and forth between PA and MI multiple times so she can visit her dad. I won't comment on this, but suffice it to say that I have been the one who has schlepped and paid for these journeys.

Into the Future

- In early July I will travel to Vancouver and give a paper on the functional role of images, with the twist of what I found with the museum images on Flickr.

- I think I will work up some slides and a paper to go along with the Flickr study. What I found was FASCINATING! (at least to me). ;-)

- There are several folks I need to contact, too, since I certainly didn't have time for this during the academic year. :-P

So that about sums up the last year and a half. It has been a very stressful period in my life, but I love the house I am living in!!!! The gardens are growing like crazy and we are eating stuff out of the garden nearly every night now. Tonight I might have the mustard greens... the strawberries should be ripe soon. They look so lovely and there are oodles of berries. YUM!

Ten crazy months!

It is remarkable that it has been so long since I posted anything to the blog. I guess it is a sign of how full my life has been over the past 10 months. Eeeek. I am not going to revisit history here, but I will say that I successfully defended my dissertation and the revisions requested by my committee are nearly finished. Not a bad place to be... :-) I have lots of stress and turmoil in my life these days and so knowing one major accomplishment has nearly been achieved is a very good thing. Yay!

Cherish the Old and Welcome the New

It has been several months since I had the chance to come and post here. Things have been extremely busy for me in the interim, but I have been enjoying the sometimes crazy ride immensely. The last few weeks have been spent pulling together all of the various bits of information about my professional and educational experience in preparation for applying for faculty positions. For anyone who might have this road ahead of them - begin early if this is at all possible! Luckily I had a fairly solid bit of information already prepared in resume form and through the portfolio which is a continuously updated requirement as one passes through the PhD program at Drexel. It is remarkable how much time it takes to harvest all that information and plant it in a new context... of course all this is going on while holiday prep is in order, my daughter is home on holiday and I am chomping at the bit to be back at work on the dissertation. Lol! I can honestly say there is never a dull moment in my household.

The dissertation research has been progressing nicely. The transcription of the interviews are being worked on and these should be completed within the next few weeks. The data analysis is moving along as well, but I have been trying to catch up with the transcription before I move ahead. I have collected data from four individuals in each of the groups. The majority of the individuals within each group seem to share very similar behaviors,. However each of the artists speak very differently about their need and use of images. It will be fascinating to see what actually comes out of the data analysis over the course of the next few weeks. Once I have a better feel for the data I will go ahead with the remaining data collection.

Through the process of conducting the dissertation research I am discovering how much I enjoy interviewing people. (I still hate hearing the sound of my own voice, but the interviewing process itself is pure joy!) We are fascinating creatures and the individuals I am studying (architects, archaeologists, art historians and artists) are even more engaging to me because of my interests. I am so fortunate to have had the opportunity to interview and interact with such a wonderful, giving and talented group of individuals. Yay participants!

The data analysis process is going along well, although it is much more time-consuming than I would have ever thought possible. I am coding the data using NVivo which is a sort of tedious and non-intuitive process (the application, not the activity) . I sometimes feel like the app is getting in the way of the coding. It works well otherwise and I can create some wonderful graphical outputs from the data so I will stick with it. I am preparing for the first inter-coder checks and this is not without some degree of trepidation. I read a recent article about the process (Foster, A., Urquhard, C. & Turner, J. (2008.) Validating coding for a theoretical model of information behavior. Information Research, 13(4), paper 358. [Available at: http://informationR.net/ir/13-4/paper358.html]) and this didn't do much to allay my fears. As I felt would happen, these researchers found that the more detailed and nuanced codes had very low rates of co-occurrence among the coders. The more concrete and basic the codes, the higher the rates of inter-rater reliability. No surprises there! Regardless of the angst associated with the inter-coder checks, I know it is one of the best tests of my understanding of the data.

There is another paper from that same issue of IR (paper 361 by Pertiii Vakkari) that I will try to get through tonight. It discusses trends in the theory and methods of information behavior research within the field of information science. Looks like a good read that addresses the quali vs. quanti issue in research studies

Sunday Morning

It is a glorious fall day out there! I love this time of the year - so crisp, clear, sunny and just a hint of chilly. :-) Doesn't get much nicer than this. My daughter and I took a late afternoon walk through the Wissahickon section of Fairmount Park yesterday. It was lovely. We both love nature so much and Mimi got the added bonus of seeing lots of dogs. It was just such a pleasure to be away from my laptop, be moving and outside. Bliss!

Since the last post I have recruited a few more people, but the scheduling is still very slow going. I performed the survey and interview with two more people and so things are moving. Yay! It is a very exciting phase of the process. I just wish things would move a bit faster in the scheduling department. I am going to spend the next few days transcribing and coding. I think I might try to begin the coding process over again. See if I can recreate it with less chaos. It lacks coherence in a few areas and now that I have more data I can see some themes emerging that I don't know that I captured well in the earlier interviews. So for this week, beyond helping my online students I will work on developing the coding (and of course more recruitment/scheduling). Always lots of fun.

Ok, time to get motivated and out of the house. That fall weather is calling!

A Quick Catch-Up

It has been another fast five weeks! I defended my dissertation proposal on the 28th of August. As luck would have it I ended up with a terrible cold, complete with a raging fever just in time to prepare my slides for the defense! How lucky is that? It ended up being ok in the end, since I was well enough to have a voice for the presentation but still sick enough that I had no energy to get worked up or worried. It seems Fate was somehow looking out for me.

I am now trying to schedule participants and recruit for the few last open slots. I am doing fairly well, but most people are super busy and that means waiting another month (or more) to meet with them. In the meantime I sort of bite my nails and try not to think about how crazy busy I am going to be over the next few months. I am teaching a course which is really demanding and it is being given online and so there are no boundaries. I am teacher 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Not that this isn't the case with a face-to-face class, but the expectations of the students are definitely different! On top of all this I am volunteering a bit of time to two causes I feel strongly about: the school library and Brownie Girl Scouts. The first one is a given - I love books and kids need to enjoy being around them, too! I try to make things fun for the kiddolas when they check their books out. It is so important for lil' ones to be exposed to the library as much and as often as possible when they are young. I also want to help instill in a young girl the idea that she can succeed and lead, because heaven knows they aren't getting that message nearly often enough in most other areas of their lives! The GS do wonderful things to help girls achieve greatness and I want to help in whatever small way I can.

Ok, I suppose I should get back to work. I am transcribing an interview today, helping out at the library and hopefully getting back to the image indexing data. It never ends!

A Fast Five Weeks

Another phase of my dissertation has come and gone. I handed my proposal off to my committee this past Thursday in preparation for the defense on the 28th. It feels good to have that part done. Since I last posted I have been super busy with teaching, giving papers, submitting things for conferences, and data analysis. I managed to recruit an art historian for the pilot and the interview for that was great for seeing if there were some similarities between the two academic user groups I am looking at (archaeologists and art historians). The data analysis using NVivo was a bit cumbersome. I think that is a result of my lack of skill using the software, however. The analysis did reveal somethings to keep my eyes on as things progress. The architect group is going to be the one I have the most difficulty recruiting for. Not having a personal connection to the individuals in the group, as I do with the art historians, archaeologists and artists means the recruitment process has been slow and painful. The study is only an hour now, so I hope that will make a difference when I try to get the last participants. I didn't want to use one of my architect recruits on the pilot fearing that I might need to change the methods in response to the defense. That would mean throwing out the pilot data. Not something I want to do when I don't have enough access to the architects as it is!

The course I am teaching is going well. The students are great fun. They love to talk and they are engaged with the material (for the most part). The course is mainly focused on learning about the reference process and users' information behaviors. The readings have been a joy to read, distill and present to the class. The information behavior theories are probably the most important ones for many of them to fully understand. There are reviews of these built into the course and these really try to drive home how important the theories are to the discipline. I hope I am doing the material justice.

Alright, Mimi is away at camp this week. Hopefully she will like this one better than the away camp she went to last summer. She doesn't like competition and the program for this one sounded more like it focused on hikes and arts and crafts. Both of these things make her very happy. We'll see... Today I have a lot to do so I had better get cracking!

May-hem

How weird, it is the end of May and I feel like I have been living in dissertation limbo. Oh, yes, that's right, I HAVE been living in dissertation limbo. :-P The IRB approval for the data collection methods changes came through this past week and so I am back to recruiting. I have an interview lined up for Wednesday and that is a very good thing. Motivation breeds motivation and hopefully things will start to role once I see how the new questions work. I am feeling a bit conflicted about not including the direct observation of their searches, since it means I will loose all that rich data. Nevertheless, if the artists and architects don't seek out images in a planned manner, the observation is just going to make the study impossible. Perhaps a future study... one where I have the luxury of time on my hands.

This past month has been pretty spectacular when I think back on what I have managed to do. I have been TAing for a course and taking a course and those two things alone have sucked up a great deal of time. I have managed to do some work toward the dissertation (or should I say I have managed to get it back into my daily routine). I have lined up two participants for the study - an archaeologist and an artist. The first I will interview this coming week and the artists will be done in a few weeks. I am also going to start contacting possible recruiters. I won't know until at least next week if the data collection methods will work for this one group and it will be another week or so to know if they will work for the other group. I should have a sense of how well the data collection methods are going to work once I get these two done. If all seems to be ok, I will set dates with participants. :-) Yipee. I just hope it isn't too late to grab the faculty before they flee for their summer locations.

This summer I am going to teach a course in info science and I am very happy about this. I love the course I will be teaching -- it is right up my interest alley since it deals with the information behaviors of users. Drool. Can it get any better? I will be re-reading (some probably for the 4th or 5th time) lots of the standard literature in this area. Dissertation motivation will keep me very focused on the material and I hope this enthusiasm will spread to the students. It looks like it will be a small course in terms of the number of students. That is a perfect way to begin teaching a new course. The fall will be more challenging with INFO622. It is such an important course filled with some very difficult theoretical and conflicting readings. Plus it is online which means there are no boundaries... it is all coursework all the time.

For right now I need to work on the paper for the course I am in -- it is due on Friday. For once I would like to have it done on time!