Week 8 - I Need a Citation Vacation

What a week this was!  I will remember this past week for a while.  I finally got the Freelance Guide table of contents set.  We basically used the results from the websort, which — by the way — we achieved our target audience response of 100, and as the result of that understood that the original line-up for the table of content was a bit “off.”

We added in a new section called “Career Services Listing,” which basically, as it states, is a listing of all of the staff in Career Services with a notation of who they serve.  We kept the "FAQ" where it was, and then basically took the section that was called “Keeping up with Trends,” and melded it into a new section called "The Resource Center" together with the content from “Helpful Resources.” We then ended up with four main sections.

Three of those sections were also renamed, as follows:

• Section 3 — Getting Established → Getting Started
• Section 4 — Finding Work → Finding Work
• Section 5 — Finances & Legal Issues → Learning About Finances & Legalities
• Section 6 — Helpful Resources → The Resource Center

From an information architecture point of view it is always good to keep your labeling in perfect syntax, such as getting, finding and learning.  But, when you want to make an emphatic gesture, so to speak, (with your labeling) it’s ok to change that (The Resource Center).

When "Helpful Resources"was listed in the prior document, the categories were separated by subject matter and grouped together by major.  We decided to undo that so that in the new version, all resources will be first —grouped by major —and then sorted by subject matter. The subject matters are conferences, industry directories, useful periodicals, professional organizations, recommended reading, and useful websites.

 
Anyway, I thought that was going to be the end of the formatting and fooling around with the actual content.  I thought that I was going to be able to concentrate on creating the complementary website that goes with this guide.  But one of the last things that I went to do was to take the document and send it through “Turnitin.com” to check the references and possible citation violations. 

Did I say possible violations?   After getting the document back and scrubbed through “turnitin” — it was determined that 52% of the content was taken from other sources that were not accurately cited.
So, the notion of me being able to do parts two and three (extensive training and white paper) of my sabbatical are probably going out the window — for now. 

I am going to have to spend a good deal of time ensuring that all the content for this document (and subsequent website) is cited and permissions have been obtained.  If the “owners” of the content are not inclined to give it over for free, then I will have to figure out either a way to pay for it, or write the content myself.

The listing of content owners is quite large, and in some cases very vague as to who “owns” the content. For example, many sections of the Freelance Guide were taken from state and federal government websites, and I am less concerned about those as we are doing a public service through re-purposing the content.  Where I am concerned is content that expressly states that it is copyrighted and permissions are needed.   I have started to write all of the owners, and it hasn’t been easy figuring out who they are. In some cases I have to write the webmaster of the site that the content came from to figure out who the author or writer was.  And because this is the third time that the original content has been edited, the results from "turnitin" have been vague.

Well, the good news is I am spending down-time learning Joomla! because I do have to go back into the web content to cite everything. And I must thank my best pal in the world, my colleague, Marlyn Tadros, for helping me learn the more difficult parts of this software.

I am not going to list out the past week’s activities because I literally worked on this document, every day, for nearly 8 to 10 hours in one activity or another. And I know that there’s a thought that sabbatical periods are a breeze, and for some, maybe that has been the case, but for me this has been hard work and a good understanding of what can happen in a large project such as this.

Hopefully, my news will be better next week!