GLAMorous Windmill Tilter

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Evaluation of Donation

In all honesty, I was a little bit shocked when first learnt that libraries didn't necessarily dig random donations. I mean, now I have a much better understanding of collection development, I can see why it would be a jerk. But seriously, the GLAM is all about collecting stuff and therefore having more stuff should be the aim of the game. 

I can remember sneaking into a Museum Vic presentation about assembling a 'significant' collection for small/community institutions and it kinda blew my mind. The principle were simple- don't have an amount that is surplus to requirement, make sure it's of the best quality that you can find/achieve and make sure it is relevant. 'Provenance' was a word that was bandied about a fair bit, and with good reason. 

The definition of provenance (in this context anyway) is ‘a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality’.

Now that I am working with a virtual collection, how would donations work? Digital assets can be changed so easily and by so many people, how hard would it be to keep track/retain that provenance? Also, with so much of our published works being digitally born, will we soon be accepting donations of people’s hard drives? How are we going to know that this content is ‘really real’? What will be our safe guards? This is not a really knew set of thought processes- there are papers and symposiums on the topic already (although this seems to be more about using digital information about ‘analogue works’ more than those born in digital space). However, one could argue that anything in the digital space already devalues provenance, as it is inherently derivative (which is sort of the coolest thing about it). None of these thing address how we go about accessing donated items- whether ‘really real’ is going to continue to be really important or not. This is not something I necessarily have an answer to, but just something to think about.    

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

2019: Show Me the PD

2018 was pretty big, to be honest. I lived in two different hemisphere, travelled through Central America, landed my first full time library job and acquired a surprisingly extensive orchid collection in a very short amount of time.

What it was lacking, however, was some professional development  (although, truth be told, I did go to a conference right at the beginning of the year. I merely spent the whole time suffering from an extensive bout of imposter syndrome) . Now, clearly I did develop professionally- internship to a full time role is not something that a lot of my fellow interns immediately stepped into. But I want some fresh lines on my CV. I want the capacity to PROGRESS. I have come this far this fast and I am throughly uninterested in loosing momentum now. 

This is exacerbated a little by the fact that, although I love my job, I have all these skills that I do not get to use. And I really want to use them, in case I loose them. Having been in management roles in my prior career path and am now very far down the pecking order is also mildly frustrating (although it’s also very nice to walk away from things at the end of the day, safe in the knowledge that it’s all very low level and nothing will catch on fire. Metaphorically speaking).  

An odd bit of random feedback that I was given was that I maybe too lowly to obtain the kind of PD that I was craving (going to conferences, writing papers, doing the academic equivalent of gadding about town). On one hand, I can understand this train of thought, but on the other... WHAT?! The concept that there is some sort of threshold that would magically prevent you from _getting better at your job_, as well as _giving more to the organisation that employs you_ is fundamentally flawed. 

I came into my roll a little bit too far into the financial year for any of my PD dreams to come true in 2018 (budgets and all that jazz), but I have both a better understand of the processes and have put it front and centre of all my goal documentation, so all my ‘i’s and ‘t’s should have the requisite parts. Come on, 2019. Don’t let me down.    

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

When There Is No End In Sight

I was talking to someone about my work over Christmas- some family/friends I haven’t seen since I got back from the US and I was asked how long my job would take me. 

I won’t lie, it took me quite some time to work out what they actually meant (which was how long it would take me to scan every book in the University’s collection. The short answer is FOREVER). It made me realise just how small project orientated I am. I don’t see the larger end goal (scanning every book under the sun), more the short term, achievable goals (like what do I need to have done by the end of day, this week, month etc).  There is a reason why people like to express “ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED” whilst pumping the air with one’s fist- because completion is a very important part of the process. But when you don’t have your eye on the (possibly arbitrary) finishing line, things can get a little bit fraught.   Sometimes I forget to inform other’s have I have these deadlines, or they feel like they have accidentally enforced one on me, which can lead to a bit of a communication dance. It’s a two-step that I am getting a little bit better at. 

For longer term projects, I sit down with my supervisor and explain my time calculations and where I need to be at by the end of each day. I legitimately think I freaked them out the first time I did it, but I find it so easy to be overwhelmed and lose focus if I do not have easily obtainable, short term deadline in sight.  

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Change Management

It’s taken me a while to get good at change. I am acutely aware that I have a propensity to stay in the security of established norms, rather than forge new pathways. However, if I think about it, these last few years very much fly in the face of that particular paradigm. 

I can remember a particular course in my masters that had a focus on change management. The course work discussed about how, if you actually managed to initiate change, you will also need to prepare yourself for both the initial backlash from any opposition, but also the slow slide back into prior habits and processes.

I think what they are discussing, in this instance anyways, is a huge and (relatively) sudden shift. Personally, I like change that feels like a progression. I know that there are a variety of steps and smaller, achievable goals. If all the newness is to tiring (and the exhaustion of learning new things is very real, I think we can all agree), you can have a bit of a break and settle in. Comfort and change are equally as important. Changing smart, as opposed to simply fast, is very much my personal preference. 

I am totally aware that this is not the case for everyone. I have friends that require a refresh regularly. The thought of being without a constant flow of newness is unsettling and make them unhappy. And that’s cool. Sometimes, for a bit of a thrill, I get buffeted along with that vortex, safe in the knowledge that I can go home, make myself into a blanket burrito and watch Pride and Prejudice on Netflix until inner calm is resolved.

I think there is something to be said for taking stock and recognising the best processes for you in regards to change. I know I need a good run up, time to plan, make a back up plan, make a back up plan’s back up plan, a general escape plan and any documentation signed in triplicate. Once these have been completed, I am usually found tapping my foot and muttering about why this change has not happened already. But I am a complex bundle of detail-orientated-but-impaitent needs.

Within a workplace context, it would definitely be realising the crisis point of team members and being able to offer support during those stages. It’s a lot of hand holding. But having one successful change period would be much better than multiple run ups into the process. Once something has appeared to have ‘failed’ it’s hard to get the organisation (and team) back onto that proverbial horse.    

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Beginning Is Not the Hardest Part

This month’s theme of BEGINNING has been a little bit tricksy. I feel like I have trotted out a series of origin stories a few times in blog posts, seminars and generally about the place and I am feeling a little like a broken record. My career in this field is new and simply just not that interesting upon repetition.  

The truth is that starting something is usually quite easy. Most of the big things in my life I started with really even thinking about it too much. Starting my Master’s happened over a cup of tea and one Librarian friend saying ‘I love my job, you hate yours. You should do my job’. and I thought- ok. But the start is not the hard bit. It’s what to do when the initial excitement wears off and you realise that you are in one (if not all) of the following scenarios : a) You are indifferent. It’s a thing to do when bored. If something more shiny came along, you would be ok with contemplating its sparkles.  b) You love it and there are not enough hours in the day to do the thing. Friends can’t remember your face. Your mother think you have died and are currently been slowly eaten by your cats/dogs/goldfish.  c) You have bitten off more than you can chew and do not have the breath left in your body indicate that you are drowning and in desperate need of help. 

Sometimes I can have all of these feels about a project in a single week. And I do not think that I am alone in this. Projects have an ebb and flow- but the ideal beginning is normally a subtle blend of ‘a’ and ‘b’. Unless forced (at metaphorical gun point) people usually find a way of sharing or delegating a project if it looks like its starting out at ‘c’. Starting a project is super easy if you are digging on every moment you spend on it, or if you are casually invested in the outcome.

To be honest, I think the best option is that of dipping your toes into the shallows, a la ‘a’. Deep diving of ‘b’ can be fun (and normally where I find myself), but you sometime forget to check for the tentacled monster of ‘c’. And then, my friend, you are usually sunk.  As I said, the beginning is the easy part. As time goes on, you find out whether you sink or swim. But staring things right means that you have better understanding of what lies in the water. 

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Strange GLAM Packages on my Doorstep

The GLAMBlogClub theme this month is Strange and I have been wracking my brains for cool and unusual stories. I toyed with the idea of of the odd stories that come up in and around collections- like the secondary archives at Longwood being stored in a former bowling alley, which was next to a giant underground aquarium. Both of which were removed when the garden’s illustrious leader remember that he didn’t like sports and keep fish alive and the tank leak free reached deep into the too-hard basket. Or the delightful children’s book on womens suffrage which I digitised recently, where none of the character have hands or feet, but can still make signs and steal airships. However, the Universe has thrown up a strange little tidbit, which I thought I would share. 

Today I got a mysterious package. It was hiding under my doormat and I also missed it on my egress inside my abode. But there it was, a flat parcel, sent by airmail from the US. Now, I had order nothing, and I assumed it was missent or some sort of trick. But my name and address is on the label, as well as the University I work for.

Curiosity peaked, I opened it to find a copy of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2017 Awards Catalogue. Which is BEAUTIFUL and an ABSOLUTE DELIGHT. But it lacks any form of note or explanation. I don’t know how I have this stunning object, and this means that I am certainly not sure about how to make it happen again (which would be very nice indeed).

Manners suggest I need to thank someone- I have sneaking suspicion that this might be link to the ARLIS/NA lists I am on, as part of my conference attendance earlier this year. But I just do not know and am unsure who to ask to find out. It’s a (completely gorgeous) puzzle, wrapped in an enigma and totally made my day. The G in GLAM really does bring a sense of style and wonder to the party. 

So strange and so very good. 

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

The Permanent Collection

It’s been a busy month (but when is it not, to be perfectly honest) and I have been dragging my heels about August’s blog post so much that it is now September. Admittedly I legit thought today was the 31st, but let’s not go too deeply into that one. 

It’s difficult to talk bout collections. I think that, because we have chosen this field, we all might be people that like to deep dive into particular subjects, objects or lifestyles. And sometimes I think everyone is like that. But this is probably an incorrect assumption. But when I think about it, I have a lot of different personal collections- the main one being my music collection. 

The thing is, with this collection, it’s in 4 distinct areas in which it encompasses- vinyl, cassette, CD and digital (this last one is the largest). Now, I don’t even have a tape deck, but some of those cassette are mix tapes from friends, former lover and have so many memories spooled around those reels that I simply can not bring myself to be rid of them. This collection has been topped up with independent bands find out that making tapes was cheaper than CD’s- so that was a weird resurgence. The truth is the cassette is kinda the medium of the people. It will play when it is wonkus, if it breaks, you can tape it back together and most other issues can be fixed with a pencil and judicious spinning.  My vinyl is minimal, compared to the rest of my collection- much to the annoyance of other hard core music collectors. I have a turntable and, when I am at home, this is my preferred method of listen to music. Vinyl is beautiful and a full gate-folded cover is a thing of beauty and wonder. But they are also super expensive new and I have lacked a commitment to sparkle motion and digging in order to get the 2nd hand gold. This is lack of commitment is also annoying to the more dedicated. I think it makes me less ‘authentic’, as I have not knuckled down this elite medium. I love its feel, the way it sounds and how you interact with it, but I have not the luxury of time to the dedication of it’s growth. 

From being involved with community radio for over a decade, I have more CD’s then you can poke a stick it, but I actually feel little connection with this collection. Although I can tell you how each one was acquired, at what point in my life and why it was kept (I am a firm believer on a strict acquisition process and minimal weeding thereafter)- so maybe that is a less accurate statement than I originally supposed.  The wealth is in my digital collection- it’s a beast. I sometimes type stuff into my library search and am surprised by what is retrieved. It’s more time consuming to maintain that you might originally suspect, however, as few record label that service listeners with digital delivery actually bother with things like track names, name of the release or the artist. Which is a monumental oversight. Independent releases are all over that stuff, but the big corporate types seem to believe in divination. I spend more time hunting out and entering this information for my own sanity then one should, especially as iTunes (I know, I know, I can feel the judgement from here) now wont show any new imports in the recently added section unless there is an artist’s name attached. Random file name hunting is a complete jerk. 

When having dinner with some hard core vinyl heads and receiving a full dressing down from playing out through my laptop and not bringing vinyl along (I see it as a space thing- I never wish I brought along other things, because pretty much everything is with me already), the discussion turned to software like Spotify. Now, I have no time for recommendation software at the best of times, but it’s interesting the subscription service nature of the software. I know people put a lot of time into their Spotify- people share the playlists like mixtapes. I am constantly asked if I have things on Spotify (which I don’t. I really don’t). So what happens to their collection when they stop play the service fee? Or if, like Pandora, Spotify suddenly goes under? Where’s the first playlist you shared with your partner? Where is your gym mix?  The impermanence of my digital collection does totally give me the cold sweats at night. But it is so convenient, accessible and cheaper for both the producer and the listener. And it’s not just music- e-book/publications, gamers with steam accounts- the examples of information and media consumption are pretty much endless. Ultimately, must we relegate ourselves to impermanence for the perks of ease of access?    

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Livin’ in a Digital World (and I am a Digital Girl)

Working in digitisation, you would think that I would be slightly quicker off the mark with this blog post. Ha! I laugh in the face of blogicspherical deadlines. HA! For the most part- it is difficult to know where to start. The sheer volume of digital born content created in one day would probably keep a small swarm of archivists happily employed for a year. But not all of it is relevant, and there is possibly some sifting the wheat from the chaff (let’s not keep those vaguely racist comments from your embarrassing uncle in perpetuity, shall we?). Therefore the usual conversations about collection management comes into play, and you are left wondering whether digital and physical collections are actually any different at all. 

Which is... misguided. Now, dear reader, you may think that I have lead down an odd garden path. And it’s quite likely that I have, but trespass on my time a little bit longer. Because I am going to talk a little bit about discoverability. Today I got a little bit of a tour of my work’s rare book collection. I am meant to be working with these materials for digitisation, so I was having further training on correct handling and getting expert advice on some (metaphorically) sticky issues I had come across thus far. The rare book collection is sizeable (170,000 items approx), and some of these are too delicate to handle and catalogue. So they have the whole collection in the system as one item and have expectation that any researcher will have a better idea about where in the ‘run’ of books their information will fall. Not the most helpful, it’s true. But if you are coming into the realm of rare books, you are going to have a more exacting idea about what you need and a little bit less of randomly browsing the shelves.  One of the most interesting things about studying Information Architecture was it’s ability to break down different searching techniques/concepts: like the information drag net when you have no idea what on earth you are looking for, the smaller net search when you have some idea but not a particular thing you are looking for (most of my uni research feel under this heading), the perfect catch of a defined question with a defined answer and finally, Moby Dick, that perfect thing which you can never find again. Prior to working in these digital environments, I don’t think that I ever really thought to closely about how I searched for things. But when you are using non physical spaces, you kind of have to break down these processes in a way that we have not really done before. 

The key to digital world is discoverability. Unlike the rare books collection, where things are zoned into area that the librarian can understand as assist you with navigating, the digital collection need to be easily accessed and effective through all the different types of discovery. Which, naturally, leads us to metadata. But I find it interesting that, even as far as we have progress in the world of UX design, we are still having discussions about MARC being too rigid and unwieldy, DublinCore being too flexible and online collection exhibition software that people are trying make it do things that it was never really intended to do. This is not an attempt at being disparaging. One of the beautiful things about GLAM is how resourceful we are in making things work with little to no budget/resources and still get it out to ‘the people’. But all this information that we are making, all this lovely content that we are archiving/preserving/providing is almost hobbled at the gate with systems that were generated when the technology was less agile.  No doubt, a lot of keeping on with these practices is to do with the fact that if we change things up, access would be lost for all the pretty treasures that came before. But we have to, at some point, find a better solution then what we have going on at the moment. Books have not changes in essentials at any point since Dewey or Library of Congress systems came into play. But digital is not static and therefore I am not entirely sure that we can keep those same process in place. I have no idea that a more agile cataloguing system would look like. Probably quite terrifying. But made it’s time to stop trying to fit things into what we have and think about what we really need.  

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

The Importance of Being Creative

I have always enjoyed making things- it’s my great stress reliever. Sometimes.  Currently I am in a bit of a creative rut, as I have a project that I need to finish and therefore refuse to create anything until it’s done. 

And, in truth, it’s only a few hours off completion. 

It was meant to be a gift as a celebration of an impeding familial addition. Only that addition is no longer pending. It arrived months ago and I am still staring at this project. The issue is, I do not like it. I spent ages trying to find the right pattern, once found, it took me ages to get the right cotton. Then the pattern, no matter how much I pulled it apart and put it back together, did not look the way it was meant to. I eventually just decided that I was happy enough with the approximation and proceeded with the project. 

I have been making these sorts of craft projects for as long as I can remember. I have my original test knitting squares, which were, although increasing and decreasing randomly, was not a sea of drop stitches and still holding together through the eons of time that how now passed. But this moderate rectangle of swaddling materials as oddly changing tensions, curved shapes and different lengths rows that are both unusual and unnatural. I have never made something so ‘failed’ from beginning to end. 

So periodically I sit down, pull it out and ponder. Is this something I can fix? If so, how can it be done? Would it be better to completely pull apart a couple of month’s worth of work and start again? I mean, it’s already late. And, as I ponder these possibilities, I shuffle through the outcomes. Will the recipients care that it’s all a little wonkus? Probably not, but I do (which is a whole other blog post). It’s cotton, so maybe I can stretch it out, but it might look more weird. Why do I have so much cotton left over- could I add more stitches? Etc, etc. But none of this musings are satisfying enough to commence the completion of the project. 

It did occur to me today, as I was wading through some ongoing technical issues at work, that these creative processes really assist me in trouble shooting. Because creating is very much not about perfection (although lovely and definitely something to strive for) but very much about the process of learning to make the best of your mistakes. And it means that I was standing in front of a digitisation set up, and yet not freaking out about hitting the ‘wrong button’, willing to give different options a crack and seeing which of these results would best suit the project’s needs. 

I think people have become more terrified of mistakes than they should be. No one (unless their are part of the Greek Mythos) leaps into the world fully formed, and yet we have this unreasonable expectation we will offer representations of perfection all day, everyday. But without making any mistakes, you don’t learn, you don’t get wise and you can’t see all the possible options for resolution and change. You only see the beginning and the end, not the process in between. I imagine that, should you ever stray form that clearly defined pathway, this carefully constructed world might crumble. But maybe I am being melodramatic. 

In the creative process something always unexpected happens and it’s much more about working with these serendipitous surprises/knotty problems/inconsistencies and getting to a point where, although it may not be the piece of work that you envisaged at the beginning, is still something to be proud of in the end. Get comfortable with the fact that mistakes happen- sometimes they can be really beautiful (or people can still appreciate the thought process behind them). 

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

The Specialist’s Passion

So I am currently in Colombia- this is likely to be a pretty short and sweet blog post, but I have an hour or so with free internet whilst waiting for a plane and I think it would be pretty good to knock out one’s GLAM blog entry before it’s too late in the game. Which is unusual for me. But I am trying a whole of of new things, so why not add to that list. 

This month’s theme is PASSION. Apart from this word retrieve some super awkward GIF results, it makes me think of specialist collections and the people who love them. If you want to look at it through a particular lens, most collections are specialist in someway. The necessity of collection policy and cohesiveness means that restriction and focus to a collection is always in place. However, having worked for/with a collection that concentrates on botany and horticulture, there are some interesting and unique issues that would probably be resolved if you were passionate about the collection’s topic. 

Hooooo boy, I sure did learn a lot about plants and it really is important to know your product. I can identify plant taxonomies at a level I never even thought possible. Now, if I was super passionate in this space (which all the users of the library were) from the beginning, then servicing them would have been so much easier in the first instance. Luckily, people wanted to impart knowledge and I was able to pick up the basics in order to be able to assist research queries better. There is nothing quite like someone asking a question and you staring at them blankly, thinking to yourself that you technically know what all of those words mean, just not in that exact configuration.

Justifying additions/changes to a specialist collection is a bit of an arduous process. For instance, there was a rare book of early garden photography. It kind of fit into the collection, but was also a little outside of it. Trying to justify it’s purchase became an exercise in justification to upper management as to how this publication fit into the organisation’s mission. However, the addition of an ‘art book’ would significant change the potential outlook of the collection and redefine what type of research the collection would offer (artistic, as well as scientific). 

It is amazing how quickly someone else’s passion rubs off on you. I mean, I _liked_ all this stuff beforehand, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked to be part of the program. However, being passionate is some next level stuff (and it’s a little contagious). I wonder how many Librarians have assimilated their passions to the collections they are working with, or even the other way around. I mean, surely we all gravitate to the things we love/are passionate about? 

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Authority Control - Can I haz it?

I am still a newbie to cataloguing and therefore I am fairly positive that I am still wandering around the darkness of information services, barking my shins on the bibliographic furniture.However, I have been working on the addition of authority headings for items in two separate collections, which has been both super interesting and a little bit of a baptism of fire. 

The use of authority headings is all about Authority Control. As far as I understand it, these headings at the authorized by the Library of Congress as an established term to use. It is a control vocabulary that is agreed upon, verified and has the ability to link parts of the collection together, making it more useable. This is a bare bones summary, I am sure that this can be more fulsomely summarized, but these are the key points that I have been introduced to.  

The 'baptism of fire' comment is less about having messed up the headings themselves (I was started on a collection that was pretty transparent- adding public garden name to items within SB466. Otherwise known as books about gardens) but more about important they are and therefore the best way to use them (and by best way, I mean in the context of this information service and it's users- maybe).  

I don't think I appreciated just how cool these additions actually are- the Longwood's catalogue is definitely in need of more authority heading such as this to make the catalogue more usable. But it's the combination of local headings and OCLC heading that really starts to blow my tiny little mind when cataloguing items.

I have already mentioned my project in added heading to the SB466 part of the Library's collection, which is just the 610 (Corporate Name) or the 651 (Geographic Location) information to the existing record, all of which exist already on OCLC and which I access and export through the Connexion client. I find the names of the gardens in the table of contents, do a search, mark for export, import to the ILS, add to the MARC record and voila! All these generic  and obtuse titles, such as 'Gardens of Europe', are now infinitely more findable and useable for research.

My other project, however, is a little more complex, as it is dealing with the archival pamphlet collection that has not only an important research use, but also an organizational context. This means that some of the headings I am using have been generated locally, as these bibliographic terms are only relevant to organization and are therefore not monitored by the Library of Congress. This means that I have to search for headings not only in Connexion, but also in the ILS. And the ILS does not have the same maintenance as the Library of Congress (naturally, because time and resources). So this work turns into a find the heading, make sure there are not multiple options, ascertain ether its a full record and then allocate accordingly to the record, making notes of any changes that might need to be made to the ILS.

Because the things about having a controlled vocabulary is that it only works if it is actually controlled. And it's hard to achieve this, if there are 5 variations of the same heading and these have not been linked together in a way that would successfully retrieve all the items. Which is, understandably, a bit of a nightmare. But a nightmare that I beginning to understand more fully. I am pretty certain that this is cold comfort for the serious cataloguers out there. I can mentally here you kiss your teeth over these processes. But the database is maintained by volunteers and interns of various skillsets, interests and understanding. There are few individuals who, having been names consistently on some pretty borked headings, I would like to sit down with over a beer and give a stern talking to.  

This is soon be another interns problem, however, as I am wrapping up at Longwood and am looking forward to doing more controlled vocabulary work at Monash Uni. I don't know whether I can make the assumption that a University will have more effective local databases, but it seems likely. I do hope that my understanding and experience of authority control will increase because, gee whizz, it sure it useful.

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Happiness (is a warm gun ... or puppy. Depends on the day)

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”  - Marcel Proust  

Seven days into April and I am a shameful little GLAM blogger for missing my deadline and being so late. I know that, technically, I should be blogging about Control right now, but I would feel remiss if I did not touch on a little bit of Happiness. This is not a super easy task. Happiness is pretty intangible at times. I have a huge list of things I am grateful for, but happiness is kind of a different bag altogether (not matter how much they are seemingly intertwined). My internship wraps up in a month and it seems like only yesterday (apart from all the snow storms) that I arrived in the US. Much has happened and I would 100% rate this experience and recommend it to all and sundry. However, tis next step in my career is going to lock some things down, career wise. Longwood has offered me a pretty broad experience and I have become pretty accustomed to picking up whatever project best suits my brain that day. I do not think that there are many workplaces that will allow me to be so industriously gregarious. So, the time has come to specialise, to narrow the career into a pathway to happiness. But what that is changes from day to day. I went to a local library and watch a story time and craft activity for an outreach/reading program that is currently drawing to a close and I loved watching the children slowly focus and become fully engaged with the narrative and then in the act of making their own trees out of colored paper and crayons. I did not know that quite a few kids to not know how to use scissors as they are not allowed in some schools. Which I think is crazy. However, the true delight that I feel when I have successfully merged a series of authority records through the use of MARCEdit is thrilling and difficult to beat (honestly SUCH a satisfying process, once you get the hang of it). And then there is my sweet, sweet AV archiving, which I feel like I am getting further away from each time I am distracted by other shiny things.   But these job types (for the most part) do not really exist in the same space- so which will make me more happy in the long run? How can I really judge this? Will it be too hard to change track if I am wrong? None of these questions are new. If you have been playing along at home, you will know that I was asking myself these exact same questions pretty much this time last year. I do wonder if there is a point where I will stop asking them. I am not entirely sure I will. I think it is important to keep on evaluating the situation. Ending up being mid career and unhappy would be more difficult to change thing around than earlier on. I think that is why people sometimes change industries all together- it is easier to get a new ship then reposition the one that they has got. Maybe that is a bad analogy.   Something that will make me immediately happy is knowing that I have a job to come home to, so I am working super hard on that slice of wellbeing pie. Apply for all the things and let the universe decide is a bit a gamble, but taking a chance worked out well for me before. Hopefully it will do so again.  

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

On the look out...

This is an all-time low/high on the race to the finish line for Glam Blog Club this month. February is a surprisingly short month and I find myself currently sitting on a train coming back from three days spent in New York at ARLIS/NA. I have not been to many conferences (just the one really), but this was a pretty great experience. As this month’s theme is Watching, my mind turns to the next big trends that we should possibly watch out for in the library profession. One trend that struck a particular cord with me was that of ‘zines’- I may show my age a little, as I still kind of think of them as ‘fanzines’ (I had a friend that did a monthly Punk fanzine in the early 2000’s and they have been around much longer than that), but they certainly seem to have taken on a life of their own. Personally, I am struck with their malleability as an art form. You can use found material, so you do not have to be able to draw, neither do you need to be able to have strong language skills, as there do not need to be a whole lot of words. You have the ability to reproduce them and have something physical to give to loved ones or strangers and you can explore whatever moves you. I have always been a bit of a fan of the DIY culture- anything that get rid of gatekeepers like publishers or corporate industries has a habit of setting my heart a flutter. As does the act of making things, making mistakes, refining your processes and having something physical in your hands that you can then hand on to others. There seems to be quite a few US academic libraries (such as the New Paltz Library) that have taken the making of zines as important aspect of what they offer as a service, as well as part of their collection. I guess my question is- where is Australia at with this?

I know Melbourne has the Sticky Institute and I have attended zine swaps in Canberra before, but this it totally something that Libraries can get into. Holiday programs for public libraries with day long workshops and a swap meet/reading later seems like it would be something that is perfectly geared to the public library space. Maybe these things are going and I just don’t know about it- I haven’t kept my eyes peeled, so to speak. The kind of literacy potential would be quite similar to that of the comic or the graphic novel, but more personal… more… responsive. There does seem to be some cataloguing issues that come with the collection of zines, which I think is also pretty important, but I think I would love to be able to make this culture more widely accessible, a little less niche. It fits in with all the STEAM programs wants and requirements, as well as allowing space for new voices to test the waters. To try ideas on for size. To generate, to distribute… maybe dispose, but there is a distinct possibility that it is something someone, somewhere, will keep. Zines would offer an opportunity to create a space for people watch, in turn- a litmus test of the social cares and interests of any community, what their concerns are and what makes them need to be creative.  I think it’s great and I really want to see more of it.

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Looking back at 2017, then getting on with it...

This month, I looked a little less at other people and slightly more at my own blog habits. I have been part of newCardigan for almost a year now, and much has change (different career/job, different country). It’s a Sunday and I am feeling a little bit sanguine, so I will do my best to keep this upbeat. 

My ‘key learning outcomes’ of 2017 can be boiled down to these things:  1) My support network is the bomb. I have so many people who have chipped in with a timely ‘you got this’, reading my applications, helping me pack up my life or telling me that I am great when I am really not feeling it. I would have backed out of many a good, good thing without them.

2) Discipline is important- be it budgets, self care, work ethic, learning new things... whatever. Set that big goal and lots of little goals along the way. This is not intended to be militant, more you get a better sense of progress if you have a discipline. It, for me anyway, allows me a better set of ‘checking in’ tools. If I am doing stuff without paying attention, I am too tired. If I am getting cross at the process, then there is something else going on and I need to have a look at that, etc etc. 

3) Being in a workplace where you are liked and appreciated is also pretty gosh darn important. I have been lucky with my past two roles to be in workplaces where I was giving a lot of autonomy and support. Now, no workplace is going to be 100% flawless and its completely an individual experience of how the place works. I have sat on the sidelines of others not being able to negotiate the same workplace’s dynamics successfully and being able to do so really does make such a huge difference to everyday life. I have held on too long at places ‘trying to make it work’ and I am glad that I been able to find some much better environment in which to spend my time. 

4) Technology makes it much easier being away from family and friends. This is pretty self explanatory, but the contrast of my living in the UK in the late 90′s/early 00′s and the kind of contact I have now is unbelievable. It also makes it a lot easier to keep an eye on the job market back home. BRILLIANT. 

To be honest with y’all, I still don’t think I am doing enough or made the most of each opportunity, but I am doing the best that I can. I am pretty gosh darn excited to be going to the ARLIS/NA conference in late Feb. My internship is paying for a good portion of it and it is opportunities like these that I am going to try and make the most of before my time here is up. I also want to go to the Smithsonian- Washington DC is not that far away. I only have 4 months left, so I really have go to make it count.  

2018 is going to be a big year, I have already started the hunt for the next job/phase of my GLAM career. I promised myself that I would take time off until March, but I am not too sure whether the international credentials is going to work for or against me. And it would be better to have something locked down sooner rather than later. I am super excited for the next step, but reflecting on what I have achieved is the last 12 months is really important. Writing it all up in an application or two has really helped me focus what directions are available to me and where I would like to head to. I am going to stay positive and get this show on the road. 

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Werk For You

Collaboration. Pretty important for the GLAM industry, as we are constantly working with others- be it artists, communities or other organisations. Which is pretty gosh damn amusing, as anything to do with group work would almost make me break out in hives.  I say this in the higher education context- where you never seem to have a group that doesn’t contain that one doofus that does no work at all (not that these people don’t exist in a work context), but it is pretty amusing that my career now requires so much ‘working together’.  One of favorite quotes from my undergraduate degree was ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’- which I mostly used in the context of the mash up culture, but I think has a certain amount of relevance here. Effective collaboration can be a thing of beauty and wonder, leading to exciting new projects and possibilities.It can lead to important steps within a community regarding visibility. However, is is important to be respectful and not exploit those communities that you are working with.  This all seems pretty gosh darn obvious, but the tryanny of time, distance and pressure means that you sometimes find that you don’t have the time to do due diligence, that cutting corners is a necessary evil, or that you just can’t quite get the project off the ground in the way that you had hoped. Many hands make light work, so effective collaboration should make this less likely. That’s not always how the universe rolls, however.  For instance- folksonomies vs catalogers. As a student, I really loved the concept of folksonomies- all that sharing the work load and the users deciding how the users wanted to search for things and what was important about the item.... BRILLIANT- it should be poetry in motion! Now, having spent the last few months working on DAM for an organisation with volunteers generating and uploading content, I have experienced just the monumental cluster cuss that the untrained usage of keywords/tags can cause. I spend most of my week untangling information to make it more retrievable. However, I do think that some of the issues stems from the fact that the volunteers to not actually use the resource and therefore there is a disconnect as to what is actually important or useful about the manifestation. It’s also too difficult/time consuming to bring these non-information professionals up to speed. I mean, I studied for 3 years and am just getting to grips with everything, so it is unrealistic that they they will be able to catalog satisfactorily. But there is still some quite successful collaboration, namely all the beautiful photos that they take are available to the organisation fro years to come.  There are also those among us that ‘become’ an organisation- where all the information is held within their own brain box, making them an irreplaceable gate keeper. Which must be nice on some level, but pretty inflexible for all parties in the long run. It almost appears greedy to keep all that knowledge that should be implicit as tacit. One might even call those people as a bit of a jerk. However, it’s an easy trap to fall into. Especially when it is just easier to ‘do it yourself’, then things are a little further down the track and you are doing it all yourself and being resentful that everyone else in your team isn’t ‘pulling their weight’, when they have no space at all in with to pull.  It is important to play to your strengths within a collaborative context and allow other to be strong also. Share that rodeo. That way you become much more important/brilliant/effective than the sum of your parts.   

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

Working Balance

There have been some pretty interesting dissemination of the term ‘Balance’ for this month’s Blog Club. How you approach work, time manage, social responsibility or online identity. All of which are super important. 

Balance is not my jam. In fact, my jam is to jam as many things in as possible. Until about a year ago, I was studying, working and doing a myriad of creative projects, all day, everyday. I would find myself with a spare hour and think it an hour wasted, unless I found something to make it more useful. Maybe that use would be to see family and friends, but they (unfortunately) were further down the pecking order than they would have liked. I suppose my form of ‘balance’ was whether I could manage to do the things that get me ze money and the things that would gratify my creative soul (this sounds more mystical than it actually was. Mostly it was just doing radio).  Apparently your body needs downtime. Which I think it pretty rude of it, actually. Unlike sharks, the human body needs to stop occasionally. And I dislike how much mine highlighted this particular fact over the last decade or so. Just to be extra annoying, it really hard to ‘come off the boil’- just stopping is almost worse than going at full throttle (momentum is a beautiful thing).  I found ways of tricking myself into being still. Like crocheting. There is nothing more beautiful than a decent sized project, a few good podcasts and pulling some serious couch time. Or board games- challenging the grey matter whilst spending time with your friends. In fact, my creative projects became a way to incorporate social time with down time and being super efficient about it all   For the time I am in the US, I have had to give up quite a few of these creative outlets, but have replaced them with others (still doing the crochet, just switched out radio for editing podcasts). But I guess the focus of balance is a little different now, as I live where I work and I live with people who I work with. My creative projects are much less about getting together with people and more about carving out a little bit of solace. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lovely sense of community which is very gratifying and stops that lonely homesickness in it’s tracks. For the most part. But I don’t think I have ever realised how much time I need for just ‘me’. And it’s hard to have that quiet time without being stand offish, or saying no to people. It’s also hard when you see other being lonely and needing some hang times, when you probably need to lock yourself away for a good half a day.  Balance is an ongoing struggle, and it is rarely my friend. But I do my best to find it where and when I can (even if I have to pretend to be busy making other plans). 

[glamorouswindmilltilter]

A Short Story of Lengthy Travels.

This month’s GLAM Blog Club is ‘How I Ended Up Here’. I would like to think my story is unique, but it probably isn’t. 

Unlike many, I have not had a lifelong desire to be a librarian. Actually, that is not especially true. I have always liked all thing this to do with information management (order out of chaos, engaging with communities, helping people find things, attempting to be the most knowledgable person in the room when facts are in question, facilitating social change, etc etc), I just didn’t know what it was. 

I have always been a collector. Since my early teens, this has mostly been music. I really wanted to be in a band, or a sound producer. I desperately wanted to make music. Unfortunately, my ear is good, but I lack the discipline for practice. And being a woman in the music industry has some epic levels of bullshit, when you are a technician slows the process of career progression down a fair bit (hats all to all the amazing women who are successful in that sphere). It probably didn’t help that I was trying to break into the industry in London with sweet FA experience at the mature age of 17. I did get some (unpaid) work in a recording studio, which was a subtle blend of demoralising harassment from some co-workers and professional undermining from others.  To make ends meet I did some corporate archival work (which I hated) and then quit everything and worked in bars for a few years. 

I came back to Melbourne, ran a coffee shop for about a year, tried to switch companies, pointed out that they were slowly poisoning a customer by not seasoning the coffee machine and was pretty much bullied out of the workplace. 

Missing my music as much as I was, and this job lark was so dissatisfying, I took time out and started to volunteers at PBS FM (a regular customer put me onto the station - thanks Dan) and I have been part of the station ever since. From here I managed the music library and worked in production and decided to go to University (not just TAFE), doing a degree in Applied Communications in Media. From here I started working in Broadcasting, which involved some hefty shift work, multiple casual roles for a variety of organisations, no sleep, bad health and a little bit of a breakdown. The universe made me take a little time out again and I promised myself I was going to get a normal 9-5 job. Which was a long time in coming. 

During this freelancing period (and constant job application/general poverty), a friend convinced me that I should get a degree in information management. She literally said ‘you don’t have to work in a library- everyone need to have their information managed’. I had done some work as a digital researcher (just on a small website project) and enjoyed it. I also had brushed against the National Film and Sound Archive a few times in my travels and thought that using my technical skills in a non-live situation would be amazing. I thought about audio-visual archiving and had a short course at Charles Sturt University recommended to me. I was making moves to sign up and notices that I could do the Master of Information Studies with HELP assistance and thought ‘Fuck it- a masters should make me more employable’. 

Because the universe likes a good gag, I landed a full time job as an arts coordinator/project manager two month after my course started- so I was working full time and studying part time. 

I started this blog pretty much when I wrapped up my post graduate studies, so read back for that part of the journey. It’s been a pretty long and winding road, to be honest. But I like my roots and I am enjoying my current career branch immensely. I don’t think I would be able to appreciate it as fully if I had not experienced what had come before.