Weeknotes #1: A beginning of sorts
This is the return of my attempt at writing weeknotes – a way to reflect on the working week, organise thoughts, save useful links and work in the open. They might not happen every week and they don’t have to be masterpieces. The doing is the point.
What happened this week?
This week was a lot. Despite an inbox tidy between Christmas and New Year, my diary was packed with very little space between meetings.
My role involves a broad remit across multiple teams. This means a lot of context-switching and being comfortable proceeding without full understanding. On Monday, a big project with external funding required a decision on a procurement route, which meant making an early technology call. This is often not my strength as I instinctively want to define end points and reduce scope/risk. However, as Katherine Wastell’s recent post on organisational culture noted, teams often value clarity, direction and action above anything else. It will be a tricky project involving multiple teams changing how they work, but I’m reassured it’s based on genuine opportunity.
Katherine Wastell
Other things included...
Checking in with managers to find out about their festive breaks and look ahead.
Connecting with Tom Watson, Chief Data Officer at the Scottish Government – someone with an even broader remit than me. We started a conversation about the Library’s use of small language models through our “test and learn” pilots.
Making a call on the continued creation of PDFs and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) files through our digitisation process. There is a lot that can be improved in workflows and for users. This year will involve reviewing our digital collection sites to build a case for a large-scale transformation project (which will inevitably need £££).
Discussing digital preservation set-ups to make a recommendation back to the Legal Deposit Libraries as infrastructure is built back following the British Library cyber attack. October 2023 seems like a very long time ago!
Finalising responses to audit reports across Business Continuity and IT Security. Essential stuff, but not exciting.
I also ran my second mentoring session for The Space’s Navigating Digital Change programme, helping a CEO of an arts venue map their digital estate and think through the next practical steps of an organisation-wide digital transformation. It was reassuring to be reminded that everyone is facing similar challenges and that some of the work we’ve done at the Library can be applied in other contexts.
Interesting things
I’ve had limited brain capacity to engage with anything outside my immediate sphere this week. I did set up raindrop.io as a way to track bookmarks and save interesting posts across devices – thanks to Ash Mann for the tip following a question posed to Tom Watson on LinkedIn. We’ll see if it becomes another online silo or a genuinely useful way to save and find things across the web.
It was good to see a useful output from the CENL annual general meeting held at National Library of Scotland last year: Artificial Intelligence Meets Cultural Heritage. Melissa Terras’ call to “Be More Library” (with a hat-tip to colleague Sarah Ames) stood out with its challenge to “uphold the principles that define our memory institutions, ensuring they remain indispensable pillars of knowledge and democracy in a rapidly changing world.”
Other stuff
📖 One of my small-scale ambitions this year is to read more on a regular basis, starting with The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. I still have Character Limit waiting as an e-book, although Musk continues to plumb new depths of terribleness.
📺 Train Dreams was beautifully shot with a fantastic score. In contrast, the new Knives Out film was messy and trying to do too much at the expense of any genuine intrigue. Traitors is now a family favourite through the week.
🏃 Running is back underway, building back slowly after last year’s football injury. Regular padel is hopefully back, if we can book a court which are in short supply around Edinburgh. My attempt to do x3 daily pull-ups has had varying degrees of success - and mocking from the boy. He has suggested simply hanging from the bar to be more realistic and build-up slowly. Possibly a sensible approach for the year ahead…
