I always enjoy reading about BlogHers' progress on their research. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, the librarian in me gravitates toward posts about publishing and archiving work, as well as the way people research and access materials.

If you're having trouble finishing a paper or book, check out HistGrad's two-part post, How to Finish a Dissertation in Two Easy Centuries, part I and part II. It's a detailed and interesting read.

And I do mean "whatever it takes." Don't be afraid to be silly and to reward yourself with whatever little rewards work for you. Sometimes I would bring up a pile of grapes or nuts or whatever and eat one after each task. I actually had a package of shiny star stickers (the kind your grade school teacher gave you) and I would give myself a star for each task. When I completed a pyramid of stars, I would earn something else, etc.

Also take a look at Academic Coach'spost, Focus on Finishing. She offers some good suggestions for breaking tasks down into manageable chunks.

Instead of trying to revise a paper for resubmission, you could first try to address two reviewer criticisms.
Instead of trying to send out your entire book proposal to publishing houses, you could first aim to write one chapter summary.

What Now? writes about the difficulty she's having getting a cultural studies paper published.

Now, perhaps my problem is that I wasn't even trying to "intervene into the issues of contemporary scholarship." I'm not even really sure what that means. What I was doing was examining a non-canonical but increasingly-read author's response to a cultural phenomenon, an interaction that I think helps us read both the author's work and this phenomenon in more interesting and complex ways. And I thought I did a good job of this.

Ianqui reports getting royalties from people buying her dissertation from ProQuest.

Suckaz. If only they (or their libraries) knew that the diss was available online at no charge at my graduate institution.

I hope that as more institutions make their theses and dissertations available online, researchers will get in the habit of looking for free access before unnecessarily paying for it. We librarians need to market our services better, honestly. However, I don't begrudge Ianqui her royalties!

The topic of online access reminds me to highlight Amanda Robertson's discussion on the fragility of data, something librarians and archivists struggle with, but that also affects researchers in every discipline.

A number of our reports at work from the early 1990s were put on electronic format at some point - but they weren’t made into TIFF files or even PDFs, they were archived with another company’s proprietary format, and we pay about $90 a year for “maintenance.� Beyond what I feel is an unnecessary expense there, the format is practically unusable, and is only installed on one very slow computer in the information center.

Will the open access movement and the shift toward web-based access keep today's scholarship accessable for future users?

Contributing Editor Kaijsa Calkins also blogs at Jag söker job. and ZA3075.