Some time back, Jason wrote about organizing class files, student work, etc. In that post, he offered an excellent and succinct bit of advice: “Don’t file. Search.”
“But what should I hold on to so that I can search for it later?” you might ask. “What will I actually need two, four, five, or ten years from now?”
Stuff we use in our classes from one semester to another is fairly intuitive; it doesn’t take us too many semesters to figure out what we’ll reuse and what we won’t. But what should we keep track of for broader purposes of professional development and advancement?
When I was just getting started, a more senior colleague offered me an excellent bit of advice: “Start a wordprocessing file titled ‘review’ or ‘professional activity’ or something similar. Every time during the year that you do anything that should go on your CV or in your annual review, make a note of it there. It will make preparing your annual review a lot easier, and will save you tons of time.”
That was very helpful advice. But at many institutions, the annual review isn’t nearly as comprehensive as the third or fourth-year review of untenured faculty, and it certainly doesn’t require as much documentation as the reviews we undergo when applying for tenure and/or promotion. What materials should we hold onto, and what information should we keep track of, that will be helpful to us in dossier preparation?
The following list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, and it includes both things that were blatantly obvious to me and other things that I hadn’t thought about (and ended up having to scramble to find):
- Course syllabi
- Sample assignments
- Lists of memberships in professional organizations (including dates of memberships)
- Copies of talks given
- Copies of conference papers
- Copies of publications
- Examples of artistic work
- Evidence of participation in juried shows
- Clippings from the campus newspaper that reference our professional activity
- Brochures, pamphlets, conference programs, etc.
- Course evaluations
- Job listing for your position
- Letter of appointment
- Previous annual reviews
Different institutions have different requirements regarding what items should be submitted (for an example, see this document from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale).
The keys?
- Start thinking right away about submitting the dossier, and about what kinds of things to put in it.
- Know what your institution expects to find in the dossier (and ask around if it’s not in writing somewhere).
- If you’re in doubt about whether to hold on to something, keep it. It’s better to have too many things on hand when you’re assembling your materials, than to be without something you need.
And, of course, have some system that enables you to find what you need quickly and easily. For resources that are digital or that can easily be digitized, search (and backup!!) are probably sufficient. For hard-copy materials (and you probably can’t dispense with them entirely), keep them in one central location, so you always know right where to find them (or at least, you know what drawer or folder they’re in).
Readers, let’s hear from you. What would you add to the list?
[This image in this post was created by Flickr user Librarian Avenger and carries a Creative Commons license.]
Comments
1. Amy - November 05, 2009 at 02:56 pm
this is sort of similar to "copies of talks given," but also include a list of topics/times that you've guest-lectured. I stopped thinking about this the second or third time I did this for colleagues' courses, but was reminded about keeping track when I did a presentation for a group at a different institution.
2. Aaron P - November 05, 2009 at 10:27 pm
I keep a copy of everything.
The FlipHD camcorder sells for 149$ on newegg right now (lectures, speeches, etc), and NeatCo (mac & PC) makes a great document scanning program featuring some really well done OCR. There's also Yep! for mac- it is to your PDF docs what iPhoto is to your images.
It sounds a bit silly-- to keep everything, but with the cost of storage space so low now, why not? I have a few thousand PDFs: everything I've ever written, received, sent, or scanned. And it's only a few hundred gigs with added media.
I will admit that getting though my filing cabinets was a pain. It took about 3 months of serious effort (1 to 2 hours of fevered scanning a night) but now every week I scan five days worth of docs-- takes about 30min on Saturday. The end result is that everything that crosses my desk is a search away. I can book mart my favorite or most used docs, and for documents that have dead lines or review dates, I can add them as attachments to the reminder of the event in my calendar. For example, when it comes time to review what I've done at the end of the semester, my review appointment has a list of documents attached to it, so iCal serves the dual purpose of reminding me of the meeting, and reminding me what I need to print to take with me.
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