Happy new year

I’ve been out of touch with my blog for a while! I spent the holidays travelling, and then moved into another apartment during the first week of the year. Life is finally getting back to normal now, thanks to the three day weekend.

One of the challenges of this job is keeping up with all of the information available, doing my job, and still finding time to have a life outside of work. I’m still struggling to find the balance. Blogs, listservs, professional journals, etc. and wonderful resources, but the amount of information can be overwhelming. I really admire the people that are able to do find a balance between work and life and still be well informed.

Work projects in the past month have including creating new portal pages to our database and digitizing audio. I had a nice surprise just before I left for the holidays when I found out that the Visual Resources Association awarded me a travel grant to attend the annual conference in Baltimore. I’ve found this group to be very supportive, and I’m excited to attend the annual conference and meet more members.

A hot topics I’ve noticed recently is oral history interviews. Right now I’m working on digitizing some old cassette tapes with oral history interviews and will eventually add them to the site. However, when I think about our digital content management systems, it seems like most of them have been designed to manage visual content rather than audio/visual content. Is it appropriate to add audio/visual content to these systems, or would it be better to keep them in a systems designed specifically for searching and displaying audio/visual material?