Uni returns next week.

I have four subjects to go until I finish my Masters. And I’ve doubled my study load, from one subject per semester to two, to try and finish my Masters by the end of the year.

I’ll still be working full time, so it’ll be interesting to see how I cope with the workload.

The truth is, I’ve spent the last two years aiming at and working towards my placement at the National Library of Scotland. And now that that has been and gone, the rest of my course feels like an anti-climax. I’ve already spent three years on this Masters, and I’m not too keen on spending two more. There are other things I want to do.

My subjects for this semester are Business Analytics and the Information Management Research Project.

Business Analytics is a compulsory subject. I’m hoping it will be either stuff I already know from my management experience, or genuinely new and useful material. I’ve enrolled in the Online version of this subject because the face-to-face lecture is on at 2:30pm on Fridays, which isn’t very friendly to those of us with jobs.

The Information Management Research Project is an elective, and I’m extremely excited about this one. We get to choose a topic! And research it! I am totally going to use this to learn a skill that will be useful in my future career as a systems librarian!

My current plan is to write something about how libraries implement a new library management system.

I’ll need to refine that. It might be a review of project management methodologies, or a case study of a particular implementation, or the selection process, or… I don’t know yet.

Some of that will depend on the sort of resources I can find. I fully intend to use this project as an excuse to compile a list of the journals and books and organisations I should be following as a systems librarian.

(I currently use keep.google.com to keep track of things like this, but it’s looking less and less like a neatly-ordered refernce and more and more like a jumble of post-it notes. Knowledge management takes work.)

One area of LMS implementation I’m interested in is change management. I read this thread on Twitter about change management in libraries, and why staff might resist change.

Somewhere in the thread was a link to this book: Change Management for Library Technologists: A LITA Guide by Courtney McAllister. It’s a guide to managing the changes around library technology. I want a copy. But $70 is not cheap for a book. I might see if any libraries have a copy. 😉

(LITA is the Libraries and Information Technology Association, a division of the American Libraries Association. The Australian equivalent is VALA. See? This is the sort of stuff I should know as a systems librarian.)

Anyway: uni starts next week for what will be, I hope, be the final year of my Masters.

And then I can think about what’s next.