It's Not a Habit...It's Cool, I Feel Alive.

It's not a habit, it's cool, I feel alive
If you don't have it you're on the other side
I'm not an addict (maybe that's a lie)

(lyrics by K's Choice).
OK, well maybe I am. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am quite obsessed with having and providing access to the latest and the greatest datasets.

But is this really so bad a quality for a librarian?

I obsess with always providing our students with the absolute best data resources out there. Now this might sound wonderful and great, but my university has 25,000 students with large numbers of GIS users in numerous departments, such as science, administration, social science, and business. There is indeed a wide range of interests here and I can drive myself crazy trying to satisfy all their data needs. Now, don't get me wrong. I love driving myself crazy in this pursuit.

Now, who has the most expensive tastes? In other words, who do I spend the most of my meager dataset budget on? Business. No doubt about it. It's just that the business faculty request all the coolest stuff, and the data they need always has a broad enough appeal to be of value to other GIS users as well, especially the public administration folks. Resources such as psychographic lifestyle segmentations, business intelligence, consumer expenditure estimates, logistics, etc.

So, here I am with the spring semester behind me. I look forward and what do I see? I see that I have a few dollars left in the dataset budget with not much time left to spend it before the acquisitions folks start grumbling to me about them needing to close the books and settle accounts for the 05-06 year. In other words, I have to spend some bucks now or I might lose it.

Have I the greatest job or what??

It's not a habit, it's cool, I feel alive
If you don't have it you're on the other side
I'm not an addict (maybe that's a lie)