Bright Spot

26

Today was one of those unusual days where I had absolutely no meetings on my calendar. And I actually managed to keep it that way. I did get invited to one, but I sidestepped it because it seems like everyone under the sun is already involved and I don’t need to be dragged any deeper into it than I already am. So I opted to just provide some background information and advice on the side and let others take it to the conversation to do with as they please.

So that meant I had an opportunity to do something that’s been making me crazy for ages.

Organize my digital reference database.

I’m sure you think that sounds positively awful.

But it’s not. Because now it means that I’ve expunged all the duplicated, fixed all the things that were blatantly entered wrong, and deleted some extraneous things that never really belonged in there.

And I am a freak who loves to organize things. Even digital things.

My reference collection started with photocopied papers in a filing cabinet and indexed on recipe cards, back in 1992, when I started my Master’s program. Over the years in grad school, and later when I was teaching, it expanded and moved over into a program called EndNote. That involved typing out every reference into the digital database.

Somewhere along the line, post grad-school and when I moved onto a Mac, I switched programs and went Bookends. That brought a new world of being able to collect pdfs and store them instead of paper articles. The paper all went into recycling, mainly because I was space challenged for anywhere to continue to keep them.

A year or so ago I moved to a new program, Mendeley, which will sync across my work computer and my personal computers, as well as my iPad.

With all of those moves and transfers, errors and duplicates make their way in but it’s always tough to find a block of time big enough to get it all organized properly.

I found that block of time today and capitalized on it 🙂

And now, when I need to find information to answer questions or write something, it’s more easily found, and this pleases me greatly.

And, since it was an unpleasant day out, I didn’t even feel like being distracted from the task.

So, since it was a dark and dreary day today, here is a splotch of magnificent fall leaves to brighten things up a bit.