I've put the e-text battle on the back burner for a while, and today decided to turn my attention to the myriad other things I need to be doing: all my shelving, designing the course I'm teaching next month, writing an article, developing a research manual. . . .
I got none of that done.
But I did re-arrange my office. And it felt good.
I love my office. It's huge. It gets great light. But there are no cabinets or cupboards and the only shelves I have are. . . oddly shaped for lack of a specific term. And there are lots of windows and multiple doors, which means little usable wall space. In addition to being my office it's also my workroom for processing books and other such things. So it's a hard space to arrange in any workable way. But the chaos in there had gotten kind of epic, and I decided I needed to tame it, thinking that it might make it easier for me to work in there.
Up until this afternoon my desk had been in the middle of the room, and office space and workroom space kind of blended together. Which was good in that I could wheel my chair from desk to worktable without standing up, but bad in pretty much every other way imaginable. I had no walls or shelves near my desk, and the chaos in each area easily infiltrated the other area. So I moved my desk into a corner and pulled some shelves around so now a) there is a distinct difference between office space and workroom space and b) I have shelves! Near my desk! Where I can put things!
Before moving furniture (and as I continue to put things in their new places) I've also been purging and sorting. I found a file I've been looking for since June, so that was nice. I also found a copy of the AACR2—and bunch of papers rubber banded together which appeared to be the revisions to the AACR2. Which just highlights how painfully out of date my professional reference collection is. I don't even want to think about what version of the DDC I'm using.
I also now have one giant "to be filed" pile, as opposed to five separate, smaller "to be filed" piles. When that filing will happen, I have no idea. I'm saving the cleaning and re-organization of my filing cabinet for the next time an office-related nesting instinct takes hold.
Three years into my corrent position, I am still purging, bit by bit, the files of my predecessor. It's tedious and makes me feel like I am single-handedly destoying the environment with all the papers and manilla folders I have to throw away (I recycle what I can, honest!)But every couple of months, the nesting instinct kicks in, and I tackle another six inches or so of a 3-foot deep filing cabinet. (The woman was a hoarder-librarian!)
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