Challenges and Reflections
In a lot of ways, I was definitely my own worst enemy in completing this assignment. As I mentioned in my Rationale, I had never built a website before and I honestly had a pretty ridiculous mental block about learning what appeared to me to be a totally overwhelming new skill. I wasted a lot of time having waking nightmares about Flash programming and HTML coding. Thank god for Weebly! I'm pretty darned pleased with what I've managed to do with this tool and have all sorts of ideas for what I could do now that I have this in my bag of tricks.
People resources are highly overlooked too often. For example, the next stumbling block I found in this assignment was in tracking down website authors/owners. Here, my better half stepped in before I boiled over and directed me to several domain owner listing sites. Total sanity-saver there! Another came from my co-worker who just completed his Master's in Library and Archival Sciences last year. He suggested I avoid periodical article format resources as the MARC record sub-heading can get kind of nuts in that arena.
Can't say that I love making MARC records. Some perverse part of me might have felt like I was getting let into some secret club, encoding resources like they were Enigma secrets but mostly my own obsessive-compulsive traits burst onto the scene forcing me to go back over and over again to make sure the spacing was consistent, the punctuation was accurate, and the fields were exact... There was a point at which I started on the left side of my screen and went through each MARC record in order and then told myself I was NOT allowed to go back again. Talking to some of the librarians I work with at the public library, I'm pretty sure they employ the same strategy on a regular basis.
There is a real sense of accomplishment standing at this end of the project, looking back. Chances are I'll never have to make another MARC record again and someone whispered in my ear that AACRII is not long for this world... but gosh darn it, I *did* it!
If I had to do this assignment again (but no, really, no thank you ;) I would like to try to include a piece of music relating to Confederation or nation-building. I have some of those in my resource Tickle Trunk but I wasn't feeling QUITE ambitious enough to throw that in. This time.
Cartoon image: http://www.ecenglish.com/newsletter/10may/cartoon-get-over-it.jpg