Number two rule about library conferences #blogjune

You talk about library conferences.

There’s none of that Fight Club BS with library peeps- we share everything*, from talking about our services, our projects, tweeting about people talking about their services and projects, to sharing mundane aspects about library life, like the importance of cardigans, comfortable shoes, chocolate, pets and alcohol. Occasionally we share books, or rather loan them!

VALA is a biennial conference, with the last one held in February 2020, just before lockdown commenced. The 2022 one was delayed slightly due to travel restrictions, or possibly a surge in COVID numbers, but for many it was the first conference they had been to for a very long time in a face-to face fashion. Zoom is good, but it’s really hard to replicate those serendipitous encounters you get as you walk to a session.

The program was reduced as some of the presenters scheduled in February were unable to attend in June, and there were fewer people there in person, but it made for a very relaxed and chill first day.

Relaxed and chill was a good way to allay the anxieties about heading down to Melbourne and seeing people face to face, after months of being in a Ballarat bubble. It was great to catch up with people i hadn’t seen in ages, and just sit in a session and hear people talk about Open Access, and LibCal, and consortia deals, and feel part of a great community.

I really missed seeing the skyline, and the Yarra River and it was still light when I left the conference to head back home.

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I will be back to Melbourne and to share more stuff!

*When I say everything, I mean everything that is legal and permissible under the Copyright Act. The last thing I want to do is pay a hefty fine…

Number one rule about library conferences #blogjune

Wear comfortable shoes.

I thought my shoes, a rather cute pair of ankle boots were comfortable. Until I walked from my car to the railway station. The walk to the conference centre from Melbourne’s Spencer Street Southern Cross station veered from uncomfortable to agony.

The conference gods smiled on me and whispered ‘DFO is open at 10am’ at which point I hobbled over and purchased a pair of Converse sneakers and bandaids.

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While my errant boots did look rather natty with my outfit, I realised it had been a while since they were worn…last year I was recovering from a hip operation, and slippers were more my jam, and in 2020 I was working from home, and slippers were also my jam…so 2019?

Stay tuned for rule two of library conferences tomorrow!

Friday Shoutout 2 #blogjune

You know it’s been a big week when on Tuesday, you’re already thinking it’s one step closer to Friday.

Thank you to two lovely people called Cicy and Kate, who helped support a meeting I was co-convening this week and Jaime who was my fellow co-convenor. It was the first time I had ever done this and it was scary, but adrenalin-inducing, and a huge relief when it was over.

A exclamation of gratitude to my husband for bringing home a book for me to read this weekend, in between finishing off a crochet blanket, taking 17year old to their weekend job and laundry/housework

Cheers to HM Elizabeth II for the provision of a public holiday on Monday, thereby affording us a long weekend this weekend. It’s the only day of the year I am a monarchist 🙂

WTF Thursday #blogjune

I’m a librarian and I’m pissed off.

Yesterday The Guardian reported on the proposal of the ABC to remove librarian and archivist roles, as part of its efforts to streamline and save money with new workflows and automation.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jun/08/abc-to-abolish-58-librarian-and-archivist-jobs-with-journalists-to-do-archival-work

Journalists have their own job investigating, and the use of archival resources is often a necessary part of their work. Their skillset does not extend to making their stories findable beyond a catchy ‘gotcha’ title.

Librarians organise stuff, we describe stuff, we make it easier to find stuff. We help people find stuff, even if that stuff is digitised. A core part of librarian’s roles is to ensure the findability of information through the application of tags and metadata to describe the article, piece of music, or film. By reducing the number of staff in this largely feminine workforce, cultural institutions like the ABC are making access to quality information increasingly difficult, and further damaging the national broadcaster’s ability to be a quality provider of news.

This type of approach to reducing the number of staff is symptomatic of consistent underfunding of national institutions under the former Morrison/Turnbull/Abbott governments. Unless your name was the National War Memorial, you were basically screwed.

The National Archives came under fire for not having enough funding to undertake the basic preservation role, and was only then allocated additional funding for them to undertake urgent in May 2021 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-01/national-archives-of-australia-receives-urgent-federal-funding/100257692

Last year the National Portrait Gallery advertised for librarians, in a voluntary capacity. The librarians were acknowledged as being valued, but clearly, not valued enough to pay them for the work that was being described.

The National Library of Australia sent out an email last week to many users of their service, asking for donations to Trove, their digital repository.

I am really tired of having to explain the value of what we do to our end users, whether they be the general public (who think all we do is read books), academics, teachers in schools and members of parliament.

You do not want to piss a librarian off, honestly.

</rant>

Office space #blogjune

First photo in my current office

When I end up working in an academic library, I got an office. After years of open plan arrangements, it was a godsend. Never mind that the room was a bit big, and that the heater wasn’t particularly up to warming the room in the middle of a Ballarat winter. I had a window I could look out of, a desk where I was not restricted in placing personal items, and a door I could close, or open!

It was a temporary situation, though, and I ended up in my current office, which was supposed to be a temporary situation, but seven years later I’m still here, keeping quiet, and hoping I’m not pressed to leave.

My window has lovely lead lighting and overlooks a silver birch tree, and a garden of roses, as well as a main street which leads to the local hospitals and the fire station. I get to see students and passersby on the footpath, the occasional ambulance and fire engine, with the sirens on. Do bright shiny things distract me? Yes, yes they do.

My work from home outlook while in lockdown or isolation was of an ivy-covered fence, with the occasional butterfly and sparrow. It was pretty quiet, with the exception of teenagers in the outer room, and the interruption of my internet connection with the activation of the microwave. I learned quickly not to schedule meetings during lunch breaks, due to loss of connectivity. My other ‘workmates’ also got quite demanding around 3.30pm demanding to be fed, and the siren call of a finished washing cycle was hard to ignore,

I’m happy to be back in my room of my own, where the internet connection is fairly stable, and I have a whiteboard, and people!

Belfast 2021 #blogjune

The weather was dismal and grey, and what a better time than to watch a black and white fillum on a Sunday afternoon, curled up on the couch?

Belfast is written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, and is based upon his experiences growing up in Belfast. Buddy (Jude Hill), lives with his Ma (Catriona Balfe) and brother Will, in a small street near the Belfast shipyards, while his Da (Jamie Dornan) works across the water in England. Buddy’s life is filled with school, visits with his grandparents, his neighbours, and trips to the cinema. As tensions climb with the Troubles taking hold, Buddy’s life in Belfast with his family and friends is no longer assured.

Ultimately there is a fork in the road for the family, as to should they stay, or leave, as so many people did*.

The film really appears to evoke Belfast in the late 1960s, with that strong sense of community and neighbourhoods that banded together in times of crisis. The accents were spot on, and it felt like I was listening to my relatives. Ciaran Hinds’ pop was attired much as my granda would be, in a shirt and tie, and also one for profound thoughts. Catriona Balfe reminded me in parts of my mum in her fierceness in protecting and scolding Buddy at the same time.

The usage of black and white as a storytelling mechanism felt a bit like Schindler’s List, insofar as it’s reminiscent of the footage that people would have seen and have related to the historic events of riots and unrest, bombings and British troops occupying part of the United Kingdom. While it gives a bit of distance to the events, it still cannot mask the fear or terror when the family is in the midst of the violence. Branagh has also borrowed a bit from westerns in a classic standoff scene between Billy (Colin Morgan) and Da during a tense situation involving British troops.

There were a couple of things which jarred slightly. Despite the fact that they were trying to pay down a hefty tax bill, and were drowning in debt, Da was able to hop back and forth between London and Belfast on the plane pretty regularly- a necessary plot device, no doubt, but an expensive one. And while Ma was very stylish in her miniskirts and sleeveless shell tops (very reminiscent of my mum at that time), would she have been wearing such a summery top at Christmas?

The choice of Van Morrison for pretty much all of the music was a bit…lazy? If you were after a notable Belfast musician, then okay. If you were really wanting to evoke the era and place, I would rather have heard more of the show band style of music that people in Belfast actually went and listened to at that time.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable fillum. 4 Bushmills out of 5**

*My parents did, in 1972, emigrated to Australia, taking me as a baby.

** An apt rating system given that Bushmills is from the North and I don’t drink Guinness, which is from Dublin.

Friday Shoutout #blogjune

It’s the end of the working week and what better time, to take stock, reflect, and give thanks to people who have made the world a better place.

Sleep’s plumbing- Thank you for answering your phone, making a time to come out to attend to our blocked shower drain, and turning up at the appointed time. You took your shoes off at the door, were able to fix the issue within 10 minutes, and were very pleasant and friendly to deal with. I now have a functioning shower, much to the delight of my family, who can have longer showers and leave me with no hot water.

YouTube-thank you for hosting informative videos on how to reset your heating system when it goes slightly haywire, for showing how to manage pagination in a long document with multiple section breaks and for allowing me to revisit my teen years with gems such as this-

And finally #librarytwitter, not only for gentle reminders about #blogjune, but also sharing and retweeting about an upcoming role at my place of work- you are all rockstars :).

The past is a foreign country

Manhattan Skyline, June 2014

Google memories have been alerting me to my previous travels recently. This is great as my travel jaunts have been somewhat curtailed in recent times, and allow me to revisit places, people and also this blog, which has been taken out of mothballs for a few posts in the month of June, otherwise knows as #BlogJune

This was taken from a train crossing the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn as part of the NYC Popfest. I was the logistic person/hanger on for Bart as he wowed his American audiences as part of his band. #Trip2014 was the hashtag used for this trip which involved time in San Francisco and New York over a two week period.

Technology makes it much easier to visit the past now. Rather than hunting down photo albums, you can simply search for a usable image on Google Photos, or use a hashtag to track your activity on a certain topic. With history now captured digitally and more accessible than ever before, it’s also harder to run from…

Clip of the week #blogjune

What do get when you combine one of the best songs of the 90’s with one of the best tv shows of all time?

This.

I was feeling somewhat forlorn on the weekend. The ABC have been screening Dr Who repeats nightly in anticipation of the new season and they have just finished the David Tennant era.

I have seen this clip before, but it is always worth a visit again, especially to see how many people are involved in creating a TV show! It doesn’t hurt seeing David Tennant again either…

I know people would beg to differ on the whole Proclaimers issue- I am sure my sister Fiona would as I played it  sooo many times when it first came out- but I still have a soft spot for it :).

 

A sky full of stars #blogjune

There is a mixture of sadness and relief when Blogjune is over- relief because the pressure is off and sadness because some of the voices which pop up at this time of year become quiet once more.

I did taper off, especially over the weekends, but it has definitely been the kick in the pants for me to write more and to reflect more.I meant to publish this last night, but real life beckoned in the form of my book club meeting over a glass of wine at the pub, after which I curled up on the sofa with Mr BG to watch a DVD.

There are so many eloquent and reflective people out there, and over the years of participating I have heard about

• The Sydney Film Festival from Mal and Snail
• Bikes and cycling-(I am glad I don’t ride Beach Road Graeme!)
• Ereaders (Con seemed to hold the record for the most e readers)
• Pens
• Geocaching (in fact I found out about geocaching through Blogjune)
• Cooking and cookery books
• Books and bookshelves
• Travel experiences
• Art and Craft (I am missing Tony’s posts on his knitting endeavours, but loving Hoi’s watercolours and Sally’s ICAD challenge)
• Pets
• Children
• Music (especially Fiona’s Musical Challenges)

Blogjune embraces the whole person, both in a professional and personal capacity, which is what I really enjoy. It’s a chance to meet people behind the pithy tweets or articles shared and photos shared on Twitter and Instagram. Not everyone has happy stories to tell, and people have been juggling, work, house moves, illness, and PhD submissions while still participating.

To everyone who has participated through reading, writing and commenting- thank you for a lovely Blogjune. You are all stars 🙂

xo