I have great news: the South Carolina Historic Properties Record is now live and can be explored at http://schpr.sc.gov! After much cobbling together of code, I present: SCHPR! (Or Morgan's Monster!!!) Below is a snapshot of the home page featuring tutorials, a carousel of images, and an interactive map of the SC counties. As with any website, I will need to make changes based on user feedback for a better user experience. We have some quirks that need to be resolved (like image captions only sometimes appearing), but overall, I'm happy with the site's performance. If you have a chance to look it over, send me a note on what you think of it!
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Wow, y'all, almost 4 months since my last post? Good grief, things have been busy around here. Tangentially, if you're tired of hearing people say they're busy when you asking how they're doing or you find yourself constantly giving that answer, meditate on this: busy is a sickness. Now, that article mostly refers to being busy in our personal lives, but I've thought about it a lot recently in terms of professional well-being. When one of my coworkers asks me how things are going with my project, "so busy!" is a lame response for three reasons.
1. It isn't descriptive and doesn't tell them anything about my project at all. They know what I'm building, and if they're asking, then I should assume they are genuinely interested. Morgan --- DON'T BE LAZY. ANSWER THE QUESTION. 2. Everyone is busy, including my coworkers, or more accurately especially my coworkers. We're all busy. It is the nature of work. So here we get back to giving a lazy answer, but giving this answer also implies that work isn't normally busy. Worse, it might imply my coworkers aren't busy because they're not on this project since obviously my project is the only crazy busy one. Silly, not busy people. 3. Finally, and this gets back to the "Busy is a Sickness" article from the Huffington Post, giving this answer with a heavy sigh is incredibly negative. I don't want to suggest that we should pressure ourselves to always be upbeat, because that isn't realistic. But what kind of message does it send to my coworkers and my supervisors if I always seem degraded and down by the busyness of my project? It doesn't suggest that I have a shiny "I'm awesome because look how busy I always am" badge on my chest. It suggests that I have too much going on or I'm unhappy with my workload. If that's the case, then it's a serious issue that needs to be addressed. Otherwise, I should give an honest answer about a current challenge or success and move along. Anyway, things have been busy with my project....in a great way! We are debuting SCHPR at the SC State Historic Preservation Conference in two weeks! Several months ago, I made myself a series of weekly deliverable goals for myself and my supervisors so that we could make sure SCHPR was fine-tuned by the time of the soft launch. That's not to say that there won't be issues that arise after the general public starts using it. But we'd like to take care of as many foreseeable problems ahead of time as possible. So, we're coming to the completion of my nine-week list of goals. This weekly list of goals has been invaluable in helping to keep the project on track for launch! As soon as our URL is instituted, I'll share it far and wide so that I can get some feedback from everyone! |
About Morgan-I graduated in May 2014 with my Masters of Science in Library Science from UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. I currently work for the South Carolina State Historic Preservation Office. I've been with them since June of 2014. Archives
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