Obligatory New Year’s Post

If anyone has been paying attention you’ll have noticed not much going on here.   Since starting the PhD program last year, it has been go, go, go and this semester I just ran out of bandwidth.   I had hoped to cut back on travel this semester, but ended up still attending three conferences almost back-to-back this fall.   Taking  two to three weeks out of a busy semester schedule always sends you scrambling to keep  all the balls in the air, blogging here was the main casualty this year.    I’ll be following this post with some project-specific updates later.

The good news is that this past semester was the last semester of coursework!   Starting this week, I am beginning my preparations for the Field Exam.  The Doctoral Studies Committee has not posted the official date yet, but if things run according to plan, I should be getting the exam around the end of February/early March.    The next step will be getting my reading list in order, getting everything read, mentally digested and ready to apply to the questions.   I’m planning to follow the example of several colleagues and assume a monk-like focus on these tasks.  That probably means that there won’t be much blogging going on here, unless the spirit moves me to use a blog post to organize some of my exam thoughts.

I’ve decided to take the Use & Users Field Exam because users sit at the center of what I’m most interested in.  Whether it’s using metadata, working with a collection management system or exploring Second Life, users are why these systems exist.  I’m inheriting a reading list from last semester that covers the following areas:

• User Studies and LIS
• Information Needs, Uses and Practices
• Theories, Conceptual Frameworks and Models
• Information Seeking and Information Behavior. The Search Process
• Concepts and Phenomena
• Task Oriented
• Social Network and Use Studies

The readings on this list focus on LIS topics, but I intend to add museum/cultural heritage focused items  (I am able to negotiate changes, up to 20% of the list).
The thought of starting the PhD program seemed so daunting a few years ago. But I resolved to not think about it as a massive five year project (too overwhelming!).  Instead I looked at it as a series of smaller projects with discreet milestones – finishing coursework was one of the first and biggest milestones.  I’m glad to have gotten that done this fall and am happy to be moving into 2008 because it’s not only a new year, but represents the next phase of this big project.