Despite being one of the things I warn researchers about in sessions about ‘Enhancing your professional research profile’, I allowed this blog to go ‘dead’ for the last year or so.
What can I say, settling in to a new, and busy job was one thing. A pandemic was another. However, as this is really more of a personal blog for my own benefit rather than a professional pursuit, I’m forgiving myself.
Library life has changed quite dramatically since my last post and so I thought I’d summarise some changes;
- I like working from home. I have worked from home since the last week of February, and apart from missing my two office mates, and our biscuit shelf, it has done wonders for me. I sleep better, I eat more healthily and spend less on ‘meal deals’, and I have more flexibility to exercise which has helped my mental health even more.
- Attendance is way up. When running teaching sessions on campus, I had fewer sign-ups and even fewer actually attend on the day which was quite disheartening and frustrating. Now, rather than find the correct building and campus, navigate to the right room, fit it into their schedule, more researchers are registering and actually attending sessions, which makes me feel better.
- I am strict about not working outside of my hours (and regularly nag my colleagues to do the same), it is so easy to just stay online for an extra 15minutes that turn into an extra hour to the point where I have a reminder scheduled to tell me to log off.
A few other things I’ve noted outside of my own working habits; lecturers and student support staff have gone out of their way to help and support students, despite already being overstretched pre-pandemic, the effort as been immense. People find a way to plod on and ‘doing the usual work’ can actually be comforting. The old boring tasks that you always have to do now feel like a bit of an anchor, a constant in the chaos.
Things I’m interested in seeing; The research world has had a shake-up where rapid projects, research, data collection and interpretation have sprung up in responsiveness, and worked incredibly quickly. I’ll be interested to see, once viable vaccines and treatments make their way into the world, whether Research methods and responsiveness go back to normal, or whether the way we conduct research has had a fundamental shift.
…Despite all this time to focus and re-evaluate, I still haven’t finished Chartership
Experiments with Ephemera 