27 Things Lifelong Learning: Goals

It is the mantra of every self-help book, serious talk show, leadership class, personal discovery seminar, and fill-in-the-blank. If you don't have a goal, or goals, then you aren't going anywhere. Discovering reasonable goals gives direction. (Whoa. That's deep. I guess, if you don't have direction then you certainly won't have a goal.) There is a difference between a personal and professional goal. While we're at work, do we strive for the weekend? Do we fantasize about that party, game, TV show, person? Do our personal goals inhibit our professional goals? Perhaps my professional goal is just to get through the day and earn a paycheck so I can go after my personal goals. When it comes right down to it, everyone has goals. Whether they've identified those goals or not is an entirely different matter.

I do have professional goals. There are things, professional things, I want to accomplish before I leave this line of work. I want to see a couple of databases I've been working on for years available to other staff.

The Sacramento Magazine and Newspapers Periodical Index has over 44 thousand records. It's in a Access Database. Dalma Miller and others worked on it for years. There is still a lot of work left to do. I would like IT to build a Coldfusion interface so we can add to, edit, and access this database from Staffnet.

Central Library has held the Federal Documents Depository collection from the beginning. We are the oldest Depository in California. There is another Access Database that hold records describing a huge chunk of this collection in Central's Inactive area. These are one-of-a-kind pamphlets and books which are irreplaceable. Again, several volunteers and I have been working on identifying documents we should keep, organizing them, and entering the data into the database. Much has been done. There is much to do.

I want to get as close to finishing these two projects as possible. I do have other goals. But these two goals are relevant, tangible and very doable.