Six days left. Heck, might as well get down to days at this point. 16 hours even! That's sort of misleading since it doesn't include finals week. I don't have finals of course, but I do have one paper due on Thursday of finals week so that means I really won't be done for 2 1/2 weeks (December 13th).

Almost all the assignments for my research class are due in the last couple weeks of school. Last week I turned in an interesting paper that proposed a research project to find out the information behavior of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the US. Today I turned in a quick assignment on analyzing statistical data. I have another one like that due, and an assignment on human subjects in research and ethics. Following that is an assignment about analyzing a research scenario or something.

I finished that paper for my Transformation class and am now just working on the final assignment. Holy cow. I have to create my own NGO. We're supposed to center our work around the Hedgehog Principle developed by Jim Collins. In a nutshell, it has three parts:

1. What are you deeply passionate about?
2. What can you do better than anyone else in the world?
3. What drives your resource engine? (i.e. money, time, other resources that keep you going)

Of course I'm trying to think of some library-related NGO to develop but I've hit a major wall. Yes, I'm passionate about libraries and all that. And I can even think of an assortment of ways to keep the resources flowing. I just don't know that I can come up with a better idea than some of the ones I've learned about. There are some incredible examples out there:

Probigua in Guatemala
Northern Territory Library in Australia
Rural Education and Development in Nepal
Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha in Bangladesh
Smart Cape Access Project in South Africa
BiblioRedes project in Chile
Blue Trunk Libraries throughout Africa and Southeast Asia
Camel Mobile Library Service in Kenya
Everyone's Reading in Africa initiative out of South Africa

There are more than this I'm sure. I don't know how to compete with such fantastic ideas. Of course, I could focus on some NGO based in the US. I kind of feel at a loss there too.

Perhaps I should sleep on it another night... =)