Progress report

Greetings from post-graduate life. So I thought I’d have all this copious spare time to just hang out, read and blog after I graduated, but no. There has been a lot of running about – weddings, baby showers, birthday parties, errands, etc – and not a lot of sitting.

I have started reading for fun again though. I’ve started on Andrew Eames’ The 8:55 to Baghdad, and it’s truly excellent so far. I’ve never been much of a travel book reader, but Eames masterfully intertwines his own trip via train and bus to Baghdad just before the US invasion with Agatha Christie’s post-divorce/midlife crisis trip 70 years earlier. After this book, it’s on to Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, which I’ve been wanting to read for years, but haven’t had the time. I’ve also got a Henry Rollins book and a history of witchcraft in Louis XIV’s court in the stack too.

So, on to the point of this blog – how am I putting my degree to use now that I have it? Well, up until this week, I would have dishearteningly told you, "I’m not." I’ve been give a lot of projects – including one big one involving corporate audits – and most of them are interesting, but don’t really put my degree to use. Don’t get me wrong; I still like my new job. The environment, for one thing, is way, way healthier and positive than where I was. The work is varied and interesting, and I’m learning a lot. I still love LIS though and really wanted to use that stuff in my daily work.

This week, I finally got to kick off my documentation project and now I feel a little bit better. The project entails documenting how we deploy, maintain and fix our products and other internal systems. Sounds dry, but I’m a geek and I think it’s interesting. Anyway, this project involves identifying formats for documentation that everyone can read in a mixed-platform environment and yet can be viable years out, determining where and how to store the docs, how to make them searchable, etc. If you went to library school, your library Spidey senses would be tingling right now. Anyway, it’s cool to work on this and have one of the directors say, “Lynn, I think we all know you’ve got the real knowledge in this area.” Yay.

Since this is a project that doesn’t have customers or clients or products relying on it, I imagine it will drag out for a while. Management will always say, "I want it done as soon as possible," but the projects that have money riding on them will always take precedence over this one. That’s ok though; I’ll enjoy taking my time.