Taxing

Ok, so my responsibilities are shifting from being Circ Queen to a Whole New Thing. It’s very exciting. And absolutely terrifying. I think I don’t so much dig the whole process of going from being expert to total novice. It’s good for me, there’s so much room to grow… yet at the same time it’s incredibly frustrating.

So my whole new thing is metatagging (which I’m actually starting to feel somewhat confident about somewhat), news alerts (mostly back end stuff for now, though apparently the plan is eventually to pass off the pop cultcha one to me, maybe)… and taxonomy/vocabulary/glossary stuff (which has me really frustrated). I think some of it is that there isn’t really any formal training, it’s mostly just sink or swim unless you ask for help. And I really am not very good at asking for help (everyone has lots to do — don’t want to interrupt, I understand the concept & the devil — as usual — is in what appear to be arbitrary but aren’t details & what can be explained isn’t really what I need because what I need is a coherent sense of the vocabularies within the taxonomies and, even more importantly, I need to remember exactly what it is I need when I need it…). That was a very long sentence, but it matches the confused string going on in my head.

I am getting the vocab creation & maintenance guidelines at work tomorrow, and I just spent a bunch of time wandering through the “taxman” (taxonomy manager). Everything is so logical I could weep with glee, but there are so many of them that trying to figure out where a single term goes within all of the possible vocabularies causes my brain to hang on me. And knowing whether or not to bother with coming up with a definition for terms or whether to discard. And. And. And. And.

It’s good. It’s interesting. But practice is not the same as theory (I *get* the theory!) & my haid hurts.