School life

I keep thinking whenever I sit down to write a posting, that I'll share how my dissertation is going. But, then I get to the computer and my dissertation sounds so absolutely boring compared to all my sewing projects. So, before I get sidetracked, here's how the dissertation is progressing.

My study is going to look at the steps that a library director takes to transform their small liberal arts college library into a doctoral research library. I plan on interviewing and surveying a dozen (hopefully I'll find that many) library directors that took their small library and transformed it into a large library that would be able to support doctoral research. I'll then ask them what steps they followed and what were the major obstacles or challenges they faced during that time. When I finish, I hope to be able to present a list of best practices for other library directors to follow.

So, that's what I intend to do. My process to writting this thing is this: My dissertation will have 5 chapters and they are not written sequentially. Chapters 1 and 3 I expect to have finished by the middle to end of August. Chapter 1 is the introduction to the entire study. It basically expands the paragraph above into 10-20 pages. Chapter 3 is my methodology: exactly how I intend to conduct my research - interviews, size of the population, etc. After I have those two chapters nearly complete, I meet with my dissertation chair and two other dissertation committee members that he picks. We all then discuss my study. During this time I get to start writting chapter 2, the Literature Review. Due to the nature of the Lit Review, it will not be finished until right up til I turn in the dissertation. I'm supposed to continuously gather and analyze all of the literature that discusses my topic to make sure that I am THE expert on that subject. Chapters 4 and 5 are written after I gather and analyze my data (those surveys and interviews). Chapter 4 is the Data Analysis chapter. It contains no fancy words, only repeating what the data revealed. The final chapter is the Conclusion. In that, I talk about "what it all means." I get to make suppositions, list the best practices, and use fancy conclusion-sounding language. And then, of course, is the bibliography. Knowing me, it'll be pretty long.

For anyone still reading, that's the entire dissertation process. I'll save the description of the Oral Defense for a later day, when you've forgotten the pain of reading the previous paragraph. Now, back to posting about fun sewing or photography projects.