With only one meeting on Monday (which I ran myself), I had essentially a day to work on whatever I needed. I confirmed times for a third conversation class, worked on a project for meetings later in the week, and had a lovely conversation with an Italian woman that just returned to Italy after 30 years in the United States (she is a friend of my mentor’s and is in the city for a few weeks). As it was Monday, I also had a brief sit down with Stephanie to “catch up” on some managerial things, which reminded me that no matter what profession we are in, it sometimes gets political.
The majority of my time on Monday was dedicated to the CRM project I am working
on. While I intend to go into much more detail later on, here are some highlights from the portion I am currently working on. Even though I am a consultant, the team is very interested in my opinion, so I am currently working on a sketch of an interface I think will work and a way to “group” resources for recording purposes. Spending more time with the site, I honestly think that once the extra stuff has been removed (we are customizing an open source option), a good skeleton remains. The big project, of course, is getting everything to function the way it needs to. The majority of my time on this project this week will be on the resources portion, as we try to make it manageable and all-encompassing of offered resources, while trying to keep it from becoming too busy. This is proving to be difficult, as the NTK hosts approximately 80 electronic sources, which doesn’t take into account the physical collection at the library.
Tuesday also had a light schedule, with another conversation class scheduled. I spent 
most of the day reading. I have started a new novel, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, which is throwing a little WWI history my way. I also took on a consultation project for a student. Her research team just got accepted for publication, so I agreed to copy edit their final draft. I have learned I know a lot less about science than I thought and I only got through part of the article today. Stephanie and I then had a discussion about management structures, specifically those that rely on Boards of Directors, and I continued working on the CRM project. I have returned to the world of Post-It notes, and it was actually extremely helpful for my organization.
Wednesday shook things up a little bit. After a morning meeting with a colleague in charge of student services with partnered high school, I had an easy day before
leaving early for an excursion. The morning meeting focused on how information is disseminated to high school students that partner with the NTK. My afternoon consisted of exploring the area around Prague Castle(which included Embassy Row), as a cultural experience, before attending an evening lecture by an historian from the U.S. Her presentation on Jewish Escape Networks during WWII in Central and Eastern Europe was extremely interesting, and I hope to look more into her work in the coming weeks. We spoke briefly following the talk, and may be meeting before she leaves the city to continue an historical discussion.
Thursday followed these excursions with readings regarding the history of the area. 
While I had three meetings today, I did get to largely learning more about Czechia. One of the most useful things about my time here is that Stephanie is trying to feed my interest in history as well, as it will enhance my cultural understanding of the area. I read up on the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the House of Habsburg (the “junior” line), the fall of the empire and its involvement in WWI, and some of the intricacies of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. While I knew many of the overarching concepts of the empire and this time period, it was nice to see some more specifics, especially some of the beliefs Ferdinand held about the future of the empire. This information was followed by a brief meeting with a CRM team member about our meeting on Friday and the consultation regarding the article I had been copy editing. I left work around 1700 to meet another colleague in the city for drinks. We spent our evening discussing Czechia, her home country of Spain, my home country of the U.S., and just kind of getting to know one another.
I didn’t quite make it to work early enough to observe the high school workshop that I wanted to, but there will most likely be another opportunity later on. I decided to 
spend most of my day trying to get a head start on some of the things I know are coming up. With only a 1400 meeting, I knew that most of my day would be self-guided. I was invited to lunch with a colleague I am working on the CRM project with and her office mate. It was quite interesting, as it was the first time I’d been somewhere that they did not have English menus, but the food just reminded me why I love Czech food (it’s delicious!). Apparently today is “The Day of Children,” which is common is this part of Europe. It was nice to discuss how 1 June is a day to celebrate childhood throughout the country (and Slovakia at least). Following lunch, I ended up in another management discussion with Stephanie which showed how complicated changes can get in the library prior to the CRM project team meeting. While not everything got covered in our meeting, I think the brainstorming was very helpful and I am excited to see that they are interested in user input prior to implementing new changes in the interface to hopefully cut down on some reworking that would likely happen otherwise. This just means I have some new mockups to make up and a week to work on consulting with our users prior to our next meeting. I look forward to the challenge following another weekend in the city.
Raven K 