Avoidance leads to anxiety, which leads to avoidance and more anxiety. It’s a known fact that if you just suck it up, and start something, the rest of the process will go much more smoothly.

We had paper topics due today for technology class. I find myself not really caring much about that class, and rather blowing it off. Mind you, I show up and take awesome notes, and what have you, but my heart isn’t in it. My mind is occupied by thoughts of my archives class, and the massive amount of work I have to do yet for that class. Needless to say, even though I’ve had a paper topic all set in my mind, I hadn’t yet done any preliminary research to find some appropriate sources. When we turned in our paper topic, we only had to have two sources listed. That’s super easy, right?

Yeah, well, I checked the posting board today, and wouldn’t you know it, the topic I wanted had already been proposed by someone else. Even my back up topic had been chosen. So, I had to think fast, and get something turned in this afternoon. The paper’s loose specifications state that it has to have something to do with new technology and libraries. I was determined to not let this paper be a waste of time, so I wanted to focus on some archival aspect.

I chose to focus on emerging technologies in archives and how they affect user access. Sounds good, right? I think it’s good enough for a 10 page paper for this class. I have found several sources already, and have yet to finish looking through all the available archival journals. I chose not to do an electronic search, because I can never find what I want right away, and didn’t have time to experiment with too many search strings. I just went to the stacks and began looking through the tables of contents of the archival journals within the last seven years.

My brain is worn out from all that work in a short period of time. I plan on coming in Monday to begin reading some of the articles, and to find more sources for my actual archives class paper. I’m doing that one on the history of the principle of provenance. (I had to pick that topic in a hurry in the beginning of the semester, and it is rather bland, but should be easy enough to research.)