Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

I'd forgotten how much I completely hate doing systems administration-type things by voice. Basically I'm spelling in the alpha-bravo alphabet at extremely high speeds, and anytime I want to say anything lengthy it's easiest to do it in a dictation box or DragonPad window because correction hasn't worked in xterm for several versions of NaturallySpeaking. And, as I remember from the last time I went through this, it's my hands which know how to do programming and system administration, and all of those pathways are burned from brain directly to fingers. My mouth doesn't know how to do these things. Is this what it feels like, at a certain level, to be split brain? Honestly, put a keyboard in front of me and a heavy dose of painkillers and I can program adequately and administer systems with the best of them, but make my voice be the interface and suddenly I'm stupid, I've forgotten everything. And my brain is just incredibly, strangely tired, like I've just run a marathon and my brain did all the work.

In any case, I finally have a default installation of DSpace up and running, so that's something that will be fun to play with. What should I put in it? Just copies of the same files and metadata we currently have in our existing repository (which is Ex Libris Digitool)? Arguably that would be the best first test (not only of DSpace, but of Digitool's ability to export in standard formats).

<violin class="world's smallest">

You know, I don't regret being a librarian. Hell, I love being a librarian, and I know I would've never come to this if I hadn't hurt my hands. But it's really so frustrating to know that there was something I was once very good at and now I just can neither do it well nor enjoy the process of relearning.

</violin>