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I have spent the last four and a half months feeling like everything is slipping from my grasp – personally, professionally, and in between. The torpor of life under a pandemic and a world wracked with pain has led me to feel like I am stuck in slowly-drying glue. Planning too far ahead seems nearly pointless. And yet, every day, we are asked to undertake haruspicy, to speculate about how our organizations and ourselves should respond to the remaining uncertainty, ideally with precision. The world keeps turning and we are asked to keep up, while taking care of family members, grieving our losses, or dealing with other challenges amplified by the present circumstances.
At the same time, I feel myself slowing down, or at least to continue trying to slow down. I have not read anything more substantial than an article since February, despite getting a stack of books out of the library in preparation for more time at home. The cognitive load of mailing packages can sometimes be too much.
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I have spent the last several months in a fog. Emotions tend to get the better of me whenever faced with a barrier in my work life. It's gotten increasingly difficult for me to see the forest for the trees, no matter how much I tell myself that my work is for the greater good of my unit, my institution, and archivy. Self-doubt creeps in, as does stress, frustration, depression. Positivity begins to wane, with optimism replaced by apathy and sarcasm. You stop seeing the good in things and other people, and you stop being inspired. You desperately want to get away, pull the plug, clean the slate, or otherwise just put everything to a grinding halt. You stop asking "why can't I do that?" and start asking "why should I care?" instead.
I don't think this is the first time I've faced burnout, and while it certainly won't be the last, the extent to which it's affected me this time around is astounding.
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I am sad to announce the passing of Robert L. "Bob" Frost (1952-2011). Bob was an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, my alma mater, where he had taught since 2000. Bob had been battling cancer for over two years. Ed Vielmetti has written an obituary of Bob on his blog, including the announcement from SI Dean Jeffrey Mackie-Mason.
Bob was an inspiration to many of us SI alums, and his magnetic personality, sharp wit, and joie de vivre ensured he had a bevy of his students and colleagues buzzing around him at any given time. I had the opportunity to take his class Material Culture and the Interpretation of Objects in the spring of 2004, my final semester at SI. The class was intense in a way that few of my other classes at Michigan were, and it provoked my continuing curiosity in identifying theoretical frameworks to analyze the everyday world.
Bob reinforced my fascination with Wilhelm Reich and The Fugs by introducing me to Dušan Makavejev's W.
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It's fitting that this the hundredth (gosh, only the hundredth?) post, because I have rather important news. First, my fellow developers/producers/UX designers at The New York Public Library and I have been dealing with every minute detail on the upcoming, Drupal-based replacement to the NYPL website. You can see a live preview at http://new.nypl.org/. I can proudly say that this project has helped both me personally and NYPL overall play nice in the open source world - we've been actively contributing code, reporting bugs, and sending patches to the Drupal project. Also, our site search is based on Solr, which always bears mention.
In addition, after a working tirelessly as a developer at NYPL for the last year and a half, I have decided to move onward and upward. I am leaving the cozy environs of the still-recently renovated office space I share with my spectacular coworkers. It was not an easy decision by far, but it feels like the best one overall.
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The moderated discussion hosted and sponsored by Nylink went pretty well. Also, I don't need the records to have fun with the data "” I just need robust APIs. (In fact, as I said today, I'd prefer not to have to deal with the MARC records directly.) Robust APIs would help making prototypes like this one I hacked together in a few hours into a real, usable service.
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Goodbye, WordPress - I've been drinking more of the KoolAid. I rebuilt my personal/professional site (not this blog) in Drupal. Migrating the content was pretty easy (about 15 static pages, no posts). The functionality is astounding - I only started working on redoing it yesterday and I've already got a great infrastructure. Expect a detailed post before too long, or at least a link to a colophon on said site.
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After a little over two years processing, referencing, and cataloging, and hacking at AIP, I'm skipping up to the City That Never Sleeps to join Jay Datema, Josh Greenberg, and company in the NYPL Labs. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thrilled about this opportunity, and I'm ready to see where my new job will take me. The next major hurdle will be finding a place to live, so if you're privy to anything in Brooklyn, please let me know.
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It's been some time since I've had a substantive post, and I don't really intend to write one now. I figured I should mention, however, that I've been featured lately in print and in the blogosphere. Jessamyn West of librarian.net interviewed me for an article ("Saving Digital History") in Library Journal netConnect. In addition, I was tapped by the wonderful folks at Booktruck for the latest installment in their "Ask a Male Librarian" series. I swear someday soon I'll write something much more interesting and less self-promotional.
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I won't bother waiting to be tagged to do this, because all the cool kids already are. I read too many blogs already, so here we go.
Mary Eats is, as one would easily assume, a blog about food. Mary started the blog while she and her husband were living in Korea, and thus there's an overwhelming emphasis on Korean food and restaurants. She moved to Seattle relatively recently and began culinary school, too. My two favorite parts of this blog are when she makes videos and when she makes comics, like this one about konbu. Language Log is a blog written by linguistics faculty from around the world, wherein they tackle important and not-so-important issues like linguistic prescriptivism, 419 scammers, the Pirahà language, and cheese steak rolls served at Chinese restaurants in Philadelphia, all with a good sense of humor. Information Aesthetics covers all sorts of stuff related to information visualization. Essentially, it's just one massive blog full of data porn, from treemaps to Youtube videos using Isotype symbols.
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I'm really behind on posting, and I apologize. There are a few action items that I should mention before I clear my brain to allow me to start posting things with actual content.
ArchivesBlogs moved, but mail to archivesblogs.com was not working for a while. A few people mentioned this to me, but I didn't get this resolved until just last week. After who knows how many attempts trying to get something posted on Boing Boing, I finally made it when I had more information about the hottest chili peppers in the world. I now have a food blog, so if you're interested, check it out. It's called Feeding the Hungry Ghost. Now that that stuff is out of the way, I can start posting about "important" things again, like my trip to Georgia for code4lib 2007.
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I've upgraded Plagger (the software behind ArchivesBlogs) to the latest version and it's allowed me to add service links to del.icio.us, unalog, digg, Reddit, and Technorati. I suppose I could add more (ma.gnolia, Furl, etc.), but I'll hold off doing that for the sake of cluttering the interface for the time being. If you have any service links you'd like to see, let me know and I might be able to hack something together.
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The Archival Solidarity Session was really great and generated a lot of dialog. It was originally organized by Nancy Marrelli of Concordia University (Montréal), but she couldn't make it on account of a family emergency. Trudy Huskamp Peterson led the discussion in her place and did a wonderful job. Essentially, Archival Solidarity is a project involving the ICA's Section of Professional Associations that concerns "international archival development" through bilateral projects. There are several major issues at play. First, existing methods of international development are not working for archival projects, either because of bureaucracy in general or archives being of lower priority in comparison to needs such as sanitation, adequate health care, and the like. We identified that one of the most critical aspects is the lack of communication or methods to share information. There is no central "hub," formal or informal, that allows archivists to share information about assistance needed or offered. The International Fund for Archival Development (FIDA), coordinated by the ICA, was supposed to serve as such, but apparently operational issues prevent it from working effectively.
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I've finally gotten around to doing some serious work on the site. I've completed the first post for my defunct blog, and it's about one of my favorite songwriters ever, Dr. Franklin Bruno. I've also figured out some of the odd intricacies of Drupal and am finally getting this site to have a look and feel of which I can be proud.
I've settled in nicely to Washington, DC, and I'm living in a decent area of town within a reasonable interest of a decent watering hole, groceries, and the Metro. Halloween has come and gone; I dressed up as everyone's favorite St. Vitus dancer, Ian Curtis, complete with requisite noose. My friend Corey took similar cues as far as the era and scope of his costume, and chose to dress up as Henry Rollins.
The weather has stayed mostly warm, so I've been spoiled on that front too. More changes are coming soon, so stay alert.
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I'm pleased to announce that I will be joining the staff of the National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives of the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Anthropology as a project archivist. I will have two initial primary responsibilities:
cataloging Plains Indian ledger art for the non-profit ARTstor Project, and original cataloging and bibliographic enhancement of audio, film and video collections in support of the NAA's new Endangered Languages Program. This program also collaborates with the University of Utah's Center for American Indian Languages and is also part of the Documenting Endangered Languages project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I will be starting work for the NAA/HSFA on September 6, 2005, and will be working on a 12 month term contract.
Mark A. Matienzo