Send Me Your Suggestions!

(Click here to listen to an audio recording of this post.)

As promised, this post goes into more depth about what I'm looking for in catalog item suggestions. I plan to try 100 things in 1,000 days, and I want half of them to be suggested by readers.

I’m interested in what you think should be on the to-do list of a historian, writer, educator, and museum person. That's whether you are one of those things yourself, or you are an audience for one of those things. Do you read stuff? Go to museums? Care about people in your life who do? I'm interested in your opinion. Feel free to suggest just one thing, or a list of five or ten. If you have a standard list of books you recommend to everyone, museums you recommend to everyone, or skills you think everyone should learn, recommend them to me! If I like a suggestion but it won’t work or I have already done it, I may still take the suggestion and tweak it so it works for me for this project.



Photo by wenzday01 on Flickr. Not what my planner looks like!

I do have a few guidelines that I will be following as I select list items, but all of them will have exceptions, so don't worry about them when you are suggesting. The guidelines are:

• The majority of catalog items should be things I can do outside of office hours. Most of the time, I will only do something between 9 and 5 on a weekday if it’s directly related to work. I will make a few exceptions for something like a professional conference. 
• The majority of items should cost me under $30. I can get into a lot of museums for free or at a discount with my various professional affiliations, and I live in an area with great libraries (and interlibrary loan networks), so this will help bring the average cost down. 
• I'll consider activities with a wide range of time commitments. However, I do want to make sure that I am able to make an appropriate commitment for the situation. An example of a learning experience I won't put on my list is being a museum security guard. I think it would be interesting and I'd learn a lot from it, but I already have a full-time job so it wouldn't be sustainable except for a short time. I am not going to apply for jobs that I plan to leave within a few months unless they're explicitly temporary positions, and the likelihood that I'll be able to find a temporary evenings-and-weekends-only security guard job during the 1,000 days of the project just isn't high enough. 
• I'm looking for things related to my work, but that can be broadly interpreted! 

I will credit the people who suggest things by first name and last initial, unless you tell me otherwise. You can be anonymous, or I can link to your website, or whatever you prefer.

I hereby invite you to add things to my to-do list. As a busy person, that's not something I say very often, so take advantage of it!