My sabbatical has finally arrived! I feel both energized and relieved. I didn’t get to sleep in, though, because I had a phone interview scheduled at 7:00 a.m. for the Expert Information Organizer internship at ITA Software. The more I learn about this project, the more intrigued I become. We’ll see what happens.

The interview got me thinking about intelligent agents, a topic I have researched in the past, but haven’t followed closely over the past couple of years, so I decided to look around for some books/articles to update myself on the state of the art. I found a really interesting article, which was actually available full-text in ebrary Academic Complete, so I spent several hours reading and taking notes on it.

While the ebrary interface still leaves a lot to be desired, it was nice to actually use one of the books in the collection, rather than just mucking around with getting the metadata loaded into the online catalog and linked up with WorldCat. And, had I not done that work before I left, I probably wouldn’t have discovered that the WOU library has access to this book today, so that was gratifying.

Other things I accomplished today:

• I determined that my new Acer Aspire One netbook can endure about 5.5 hours of continuous use on a fully charged battery. I also continued configuring it: installed Thunderbird, Zotero (2.0 beta), and the Add to Connotea button on my Firefox toolbar menu.
• Experimented a bit with Connotea. It seems kind of clunky. There seems to be quite a time lag required to update MyLibrary, and I don’t yet see/understand how to get it to handle citation data in a structured way. Guess I’ll have to invest some more time in learning to use it.
• Biked to Rickreall and back on this perfect summer day. Felt very good even though I haven’t been on a bike in more than a year. Also did 30 minutes of Yoga (Yogamazing: Yoga for Flexibility) and walked the dogs after Kyle got home from work.

All in all, a pretty relaxing and productive start to my sabbatical.

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