Archive Updates

Every once in a while I do a little tinkering in the Archive section of the CMEpalooza website to try to make it a bit more user-friendly. I’ve talked with a couple people recently who are new to the CME world, and both mentioned how helpful the archive has been for them in training for their roles. Similar to the motivation one gets to clean up the house when you learn that visitors are coming (or as my Lancaster County relatives would say, “read up the house”), realizing that people were visiting the archive was a good nudge to spruce the place up a little.

There are two updates to the CMEpalooza archive that I wanted to highlight. The first is that I updated our previously labeled DEI section to now be Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. A small change, yes, but not a minor one. The term “DEI” has unfortunately been co-opted from its original meaning of fair treatment and opportunity, and it’s important for us to emphasize the accurate meaning of those three letters. I understand it’s not something that is going to change the world, but we can still do our small part to make it a better place.

The other update is that I pulled out all of the pre-2015 sessions from the individual topics and stuck them in one big list at the bottom of the archive. It was time. It reminded me of when I went through all my old baseball cards last year, and instead of getting rid of them, I dumped them in a huge plastic storage container in the basement. Is there anything of value in there? Probably not…but maybe!

After 10+ years, the lists of sessions under the individual topics were getting too unwieldy to be useful. I should probably pull out even more, but for now we’ll stick with 10 years worth of sessions and see how that goes. If you have any other suggestions for making the archive more useful, let me know!