Five Professional Development Things I Learned This Week

I remember in grade school, one of the things I was always terrible at was coloring pictures with crayons. One day, I sat down to color for a fourth-grade competition, determined to color the prettiest picture I possibly could, mainly in order to completely over-shadow and outshine the competition. (As Hagar the Horrible once said: "Winning isn't everything. It's also important to humiliate your competition.")

This was back in the mid-eighties, when light-pastels were en vogue, and the lighter the colors used, the better the teacher believed the picture to be. I determined to make a picture with the hues and shades of a stained-glass window: Sharp, dark, rich. (Because another method I've always employed in competition is to think differently than the opponents.)

I turned my picture in, was the only kid who did the stained-glass window thing, and I was so happy. Of course the teacher (and my fellow classmates who were voting in the coloring competition), completely ignored what I had put a lot of heart into creating--it wasn't pastel; it wasn't light; it was definitely different.

Meh. You reach an age where you realize that the self-expression opportunity is more important than winning...and let's face it, I'm competitive enough to admit that the two things are equally important to me. It still irks me that those people had no proper taste in coloring.

Of course, it's probable that I didn't color within the lines, too.

This week, I had the opportunity to engage in extended conversation with a competing department's digitization head. The digitization program this person heads is leaps and bounds ahead of ours. And clearly this person has a better foundation for doing this, has had a lot more training--and a little more time--than I have to get my feet under me. (And, as this person continually said, "You have to start somewhere.")

But either way, what I've learned, in swallowing my very fierce competitiveness--and as a third sibling of three, this is difficult--is threefold:

1) Communication, however you can establish it, is important, helpful, significant, and you never know how it might become productive down the road. Now, since I had already developed an opinion that this person was fairly patient and generous with knowledge, I figured I should establish communication for the sake of information exchange.

1B) Training is expensive, and it is generally more expensive than my own institution (for example) can afford.

Therefore: If you can communicate in even small ways, it's important try to learn, to sponge as much information from others in the field as possible. (Naturally, you don't want to become known as a mooch, so you should certainly proffer good humor and witty conversation in exchange for a contact's patience.)



2) Don't compare yourself. Don't compete. AND, something I constantly strive to remind myself: Don't be so arrogant that you think you're coloring the perfect picture because you've chosen a different tactic; you could simply be very bad at color. Listen to what other professionals in the field have to say, and try to glean from both spoken and unspoken critiques what you can learn to strengthen what you're doing--or to entirely scrap weaknesses in your methods. Do you rely too heavily on one theory of digitization, for instance that everything must be accessed, to the exclusion of digital preservation? (Thank you, anonymous person, for this nudge.)

3) Think things over. At this point, I am honestly disheartened by the level of my own work, and I am going to strive to raise the bar, even if it's to the point of handing off other job duties (like raw web design), toward the goal of enacting a small handful of what I consider more important things.

But I also am a pragmatist: What I am working on (DSpace) is, and always was, a deliberate choice, after testing. For my institution, it is viable, preservable, and scalable. It is a pretty good archival software; and though it meets the demands of what an institution requires, it does have its flaws. (In proofreading this, I have to say: Can we ask this question of ourselves as employees, too? And perhaps even as human beings?) And as I was reminded also, you must start somewhere; but in digitization, somewhere needs to at minimum be sustainable.

4) Be patient with yourself, with your own work, and focus on it being -your own work-. My own feeling of disappointment in myself springs from my constant desire to be at the top of class, to always produce the best essay, to always ask the smartest questions, to never, ever look intellectually silly. (And yeah, this is deep-rooted.) But I am recognizing this week, that it's also significant that I appreciate that, of course, I'm not going to be the best or the brightest, rather that I have to develop a proper tool for a proper job. And I have to spend time learning that tool and to appreciate that there indeed are reasons for choosing it.

5) Most important, always evaluate your current state, try to figure out what needs to be improved upon, but also figure out what you're doing well. (And this isn't just in technology or digitization. It's in life in general.) Then, after understanding what is well, building a foundation upon that will provide an excellent foundation for development.

It's been a humbling, educational week; I have learned a lot, and I hope to enact some of what I have learned. I hope that anyone who loves his/her job can understand that I am humbled, not because I had originally thought that what I was doing was perfect, but because I genuinely love my work, and I feel like I've been a bit of a neglectful or spread-too-thin parent toward what I love. I'm going to retrench some things and work toward enacting and incorporating other things.