Welcome to 2015: Big News Coming

Things have been quiet on my end of this blog for a bit. not necessarily because life is quiet, but because my plate has been full. More from me soon, but the biggest news items include the following:

  • Successfully surviving my first semester at CSU Channel Islands, and confirming this is the right place for me, and the perfect position for me;  
  • Seeing mom for the first time in two years, over Christmas holiday (hooray); 
  • Surviving the January plague that has lasted two weeks (and counting, with this lost voice), which included upper respiratory infection complete with eau de fever, tracheitis, epiglottitis, and laryngitis. (I AM HAVE ALL THE ITIS!) My survival was largely due to the gentle and patient ministrations of Fabulous Husband, and the flexibility of Honored Coworkers;
  • Taking on the role of Information Literacy Coordinator a bit more. So far, over 85 information literacy sessions for this spring semester have been scheduled by our campus faculty; 
  • Submitting (just today! Just moments ago!) what I hope will be the final clean copy of my dissertation manuscript to my chair. Only minor formatting issues and no substantial content corrections were requested by the committee after review of the manuscript. If all goes well, that means we'll be scheduling the pre-defense, and the defense, and if all that gets done before March 9, I'll be Doctor Harris-Keith come May 2015;
  • Becoming an ISLAS Academy Faculty Fellow here at CSUCI, to learn about cross-campus collaborations to promote student access, teachign and engaging first-gen and under-represented students, and integrating our mission pillars into the curriculum; 
  • Creating a new webspace for my library musings. Guardienne has been good to me, but I'm working on a new, prettier Wordpress setup that gives me a little bit more control over things. I've ported all my blog posts over there, and I'll make an announcement here once the switch happens so you can follow me over there. 
There's more (there's always more), and I'll tell you all about it - probably this coming weekend, since my week is swamped with new instruction preps for upper-level Art. Anthropology, and Communication classes, as well as a new English comp prep. And meetings. And reference desk. And...

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