Well, I'm not in the habit of glossing things over for my dad, especially professional issues. So I went ahead and laid it out, because if there's anyone I can trust to give me good workplace advice, it's my dad. He's been at the same company for around 40 years now, and I think that's a pretty good basis of expertise.
"It's frustrating."
Frustrating because my job is to build a database, disseminate it to the web, digitize materials to attach to the database, and create an online submission process. I've done my preliminary research. I know I want to use MySQL, and I think I want to disseminate with Collective Access. And I'm pretty sure about which metadata schema I want to use (CARARE). But until I have a virtual environment set up, I can't begin building a prototype database. So what can I do in the meantime?
I told my dad that I was working on a presentation I'm giving to the South Carolina Archival Association in October and that I was working on continuing research.
"What about looking for potential problems that might occur once you begin using a system? And then you could try to preempt them or create solutions."
Duh. Why didn't I think of that? Because I don't have 40 years of experience, that's why. And because sometimes I get so caught up in being frustrated that I fail to see the obvious. Lo and behold, directly after this conversation, I had plenty to do. I went through the metadata schema .xsd line by line. I realized I'd have to create and run a mapping to transfer data from MySQL to Collective Access. My boss brought another software to my attention that we could use to highlight materials (Esri's Story Maps).
So the lesson for me here was not to wallow. Yes, that seems obvious, but I find I have a tendency to wallow. Just because I'm at a standstill in one aspect of the project doesn't mean that I can't trouble shoot, brainstorm, or research anything else. This has been yet another example of take a step back, let go of the detail, and refocus on the big picture. There's definitely something else that needs doing.