Category: GLAM Blog Club

The signal and the noise

Posted on by Alissa

We’re all goin’ on a twitter holiday
No more tweetin’ for a week or two
Fun and laughter on a twitter holiday
No more tweetin’ for me or you
For a week or two

(With apologies to Cliff Richard, who seemingly had the right idea)

I’m not always good with noise. My brain is regularly full of noise (anxiety) but can’t always process it (mild autism). Noise-cancelling headphones are my workplace saviour. Moving out of a flat on a four-lane road brought me desperate relief from traffic noise. Until recently I didn’t fully realise how much noise was in my life, and how much easier things are without it.

This month’s GLAM Blog Club theme is ‘Obsession’. I used to be obsessed with Twitter. It was the first thing I looked at when I woke up and the last thing I looked at before I fell asleep. I spent untold hours of my life firing little bursts of Opinion into my eyeballs like it somehow mattered. I fired off my own bursts right back. People liked the sound of them. I became a small Somebody in a small field. I kept going. Until about three weeks ago, when I suddenly stopped.

I decided to take myself on a twitter holiday. I reckon it’ll be permanent.

What began as an accessible and low-stress place to network with other librarians and share ideas has morphed into a high-stress horrorshow of anger, trauma, grief and drama. It’s not a healthy place to spend time. It’s where people go to start fights, let off steam, vent, have Opinions, scream. It’s also massively overstimulating. I popped back on briefly to attend the latest #auslibchat and immediately wished I hadn’t—not because of the chat itself, which was pleasant and informative, but because the website is designed to grab and hold your attention for as long as possible. My friend Hugh, who saw the light and quit Twitter long before I did, has likened it several times to a poker machine. It’s shamelessly addictive. You’ll never get back what you put in. The best thing to do is to cut your losses and go.

Everyone is angry and no one is listening.

I am very aware that I owe my career to Twitter. Being a small Somebody and giving myself a platform helped me meet lots of great people, grow new ideas, stand up for what’s right. It has made me the librarian I am today. But it is so bad for my brain now. Giving my account to a trusted friend and forcing myself to log the hell off has improved my mental health immensely. No more blasting fire and anger into my eyeballs. No more tediously scrolling past arcane fights and drama. No more unconsciously making space in my brain for whatever American Library Twitter™ reckons about something, whether it’s worth listening to or not.

Being extremely offline has meant I now have the brainspace to read and think more deeply. After years of being largely unable to do either I know this brainspace is a rare and precious gift. I don’t want, and can’t afford, to squander that gift on shouty pixel horror. Besides, my to-be-read pile is literally taller than I am. I also started noticing how much mainstream news content is either ‘Some people on the internet are angry about this thing’ or ‘Here’s something that went viral three days ago’. Making news from newsfeeds is called ‘juicing’ and there’s a lot of it. I left Twitter to escape all this stuff. Why does it persist in following me around?

As Information Officer for ACORD, the ALIA Community on Resource Description, I manage the Twitter account that was my idea in the first place. I logged on there today to share our committee survey of Australia’s cataloguing and metadata community (it’d be really helpful if you did it, cheers). Yet somehow an account that only follows 16 others, most of them assorted professional bodies, still has inflammatory content in its main feed. How does this happen? How can I escape it?

In the short term I don’t see myself returning to Twitter. In the long term, once I figure out how, I intend to use it as a unidirectional broadcast platform, syndicating posts from this blog and making other announcements as the need arises. It does mean losing out on that sense of community and broader professional awareness that attracted me to Twitter in the first place, and a small part of me misses that. But I definitely don’t miss the nonstop screeching that now pervades the place. My brain can’t separate the signal from the noise, so I am forced to silence both in order to function.

I once described Twitter as ‘the introvert’s megaphone’. For a moment I wished I still felt that way about it, eager to find like-minded people in the shrieking cesspoool, able to use the site to my advantage. But times have changed. I’m not sure I’d recommend Twitter to new librarians anymore. Apparently one library school makes students create a Twitter account as part of an introductory course, which was probably a great idea five years ago but today feels like punishment. It reminds me of having to create bookmarks on del.icio.us during an undergradute French class ten years ago. I didn’t understand the point of spending time on dying websites. (Ironically, the WordPress auto-tweet function no longer works on this blog after I migrated it to a new server. So it might be a while before anyone sees this post. Sorry about that.)

For now, I find things out from assorted email newsletters (including the one I write for ACORD, you should totally sign up), RSS feeds and messages from friends. It’s kinda nice not being so plugged in all the time. It’s lovely to have a bit of peace and quiet.

Take off those headphones and let this world pour into you
Throw off those glasses and then you’ll start seeing
Forget those battles, those ones that mean nothing to you
Know you’re alive and just smile, you’ll start hearing

Somewhere out beneath the heavens and the atmosphere
Somewhere out among the silence there’s a voice
There’s a feeling that takes over and it has no fear
When you’re caught between the signal and the noise

The caretaker

Posted on by Alissa

Wow, what a shit year.

It was intense and horrifying and miserable and lonely and exhausting. The world ended. And yet we’re still here.

I learned a lot this year. I learned that working from home is great, actually; that lockdown really isn’t that much different from my usual life, but it still sucks; that the sounds of forests are a better antidepressant than any medication; and that months after the most traumatic experience of my life it’s still so hard to say certain things out loud. I also learned that I often sound better than I feel. It still amazes me that I was able to write something as coherent as ‘The parting glass’ less than a week after leaving hospital, at the peak of the first wave, at the end of everything. I was desperate to be heard, to be known, to be cared for, to be safe. I still am. It’s a work in progress.

Among many other things I started a new job this year, thanks to my workplace’s pre-existing restructure. It’s kind of a systems librarian role, lots of data maintenance, gathering, querying, harmonisation. A new role in an old team, but I have been made so warmly welcome it’s like I’ve been there for years. I’m pleased that this work is being resourced (though I wish it weren’t at the expense of other areas). Quiet, routine, meaningful, honourable work, in the Maintainers tradition. The work that keeps everyone else working, though it’s hardly ‘essential’ in pandemic terms, and is 100% doable from home. I found myself drawing on the white paper ‘Information Maintenance as a Practice of Care’, embodying its values into my work.

I see my new role as a caretaker, a systems janitor, a data maintainer. My job is to nurture our data systems, help them grow, water them, prune them, compost them at an appropriate time. Our ILS is 17 years old and desperately needs replacing. We’ll take care of it as much as we can, while planning a new system that might flower for longer, and make better use of resources.

I love this job so much partly because I now get to work with some really excellent people, but also largely because this team are far better anchored in the bigger work of the library. Being a traditional cataloguer meant I had a very narrowly focused view of metadata. I dealt with records at the micro level, one item at a time, with little to no ability to see the bigger picture. It wasn’t that I couldn’t personally see it; rather, my job and team structure lacked that oversight. But now my role deals with metadata at the macro level, many thousands of records at once, where the system shapes our view. I find it deeply grounding as a metadata professional, seeing the ebb and flow of data, how it can help tell a greater story, how what we don’t record often says as much about an item, and about us, as what we do record. I’m hopeful we can make space for some work on identifying systemic biases in our metadata; our cataloguing policies mandate the use of AIATSIS headings and AUSTLANG codes for First Nations materials, but is that actually happening? How comprehensive is that data corpus?

I’m acutely mindful of not wanting to use these powers to dump on our put-upon cataloguers who already have loads of people telling them what to do and minimal agency over how they do it. Trust me, I used to be one of them. I don’t want to reinforce that cycle. I would much prefer to work with cataloguers and their supervisors to show them the big-picture insight that I didn’t have, to empower them to select the right vocabs for the right material, and to record what needs recording. In data, as in horticulture, many hands make light work.

I might have become a caretaker at work, but this year we were all also caretakers of each other. Taking care as well as giving care. It intrigues me that ‘caretaker’ and ‘caregiver’ mean broadly the same thing: the former is more detached, as if tending to a thing or an inanimate object, while the latter is closer, more familial: a responsible adult. To ‘take care’ means to look after oneself, while being a ‘caretaker’ means looking after something else. I am thankful to those who cared for me during my darkest hours. I have drawn great strength from the care of close friends, for whom my gratitude is everlasting. Without you I would not be here.

It’s safe to say my professional responsibilities took a back seat this year. I hope next year to get the ALIA ACORD comms up and running, complete some work for the VALA Committee, and sort out whatever else I said yes to. (Honestly I’ve completely forgotten.) I did give one talk this year, a presentation on critlib for the ANZTLA. I hope it can help grow some new conversations in the theological library sector.

In 2020 I somehow wrote 15 blog posts, including five for GLAM Blog Club. Usually I’d note my favourite post of the year, but honestly writing anything was so difficult that I’m nominating them all. I think ‘The martyr complex’ hit a nerve, though. I despair for library workers overseas, still having to open their doors to the public in manifestly unsafe conditions. Apparently CILIP CEO Nick Poole has been reading this blog, so if you see this, Mr Poole, you must call for the urgent closure of all public libraries in Tier 4. Nobody ever died from not having a book to read.

I’m saying this out loud because I need to, as much as I want to: next year I am absolutely doing less library professional busywork. It has to stop. I know I’ve said this before—my goal for 2020 was ‘to do less while doing better’ and look how that panned out—but I actually am gonna do it now. I need less of all this in my life. Less computers. More nature. Less doomscrolling. More reading. Less zooming. More walking. Less horror. More consciousness. Less overwhelm. More saying no to things. Please don’t take it to heart if you hear me say no a bit more next year. It’s not you, it’s me.

In part I can promise these good things to myself because I live in a city that currently has one covid case. One. A single one. Life is relatively normal here, barely anyone wears a mask (though I did get yelled at by an old man the other day for not keeping 1.5 metres away from him… on a bus). I have mental space for this stuff in a way the northern hemisphere does not. In some ways it feels like living in a postmodern remake of On the Beach, but as difficult as my life is right now, it could all have been so much worse.

The pandemic accelerated social changes I had already seen coming. I had long ago vowed to live a smaller life. I gave up flying almost three years ago for climate reasons, deciding instead to explore my own country, understand more deeply my own city and surroundings, while trying to detach myself from endless grim horrors abroad. I am powerless to help and can only absorb so much. I am needed here. I can do good here, now, in this place, in this time.

Logically I know my good fortune, but my brain persists in telling me otherwise. I was already very unwell at the start of this year; in many ways the coronavirus outbreak was the final straw. This time last year I was having a panic attack in a friend’s backyard. This time nine months ago I was being admitted to the psych ward. My illness was life-threatening. I did not expect to see Christmas.

There can’t be many people out there whose mental health at the end of this year is better than it was at the start. I have found great solace in the latter-day writings of Sarah Wilson, whose book First we make the beast beautiful: a new story about anxiety was the last book I bought in person before everything fell apart, and whose new release This one wild and precious life I look forward to bringing with me on a brighter path.

To the extent I have any goals for next year—other than continuing to not die—I hope to do more of the things I enjoy, rather than reading about them in books. Books have long been my way of making sense of the world; according to my mother I learned to read at the age of 2 1/2 and would happy babble away reading the newspaper (sometimes I even understood it, too). Books make sense in a way people never have. Books are solid, portable, dependable, usually upfront about things, and even if they’re not it can occasionally be fun to decode or divine their real meaning. Books generally have a point. People often have no point and are seldom upfront about things. It makes life deeply frustrating.

Another book I acquired just before lockdown was Lucy Jones’ Losing Eden: how our minds need the wild. It’s still in a moving box, stored away due to lack of shelf space. But I’m sure the author would be just as happy if people took her message to heart and ventured outside a bit more anyway. I couldn’t face it during April, when going outside was dumb and illegal, but perhaps this coming year, in my suspiciously covid-free paradise, would be a good time to revisit.

My goal is not to lessen my reading. I didn’t finish a single book this year. And that’s okay because I kinda had bigger things to deal with. But instead of reading about the delights of nature, I think I would prefer to experience them myself. Like many in the book professions, I have a terrible habit of buying really interesting-looking books, placing them on a shelf, and then acting as if I have read them and absorbed their wisdom by osmosis. I would like to read more, but I would also like to go outside more, walk more, take flower photos more, cycle more, do the things instead of reading about them. I hope to take care of myself. I hope to take care of others. I hope others might still take care of me.

Or, in other words, as painted by a dear friend:

On agency

Posted on by Alissa

A bare forest shrouded in fog

I’ve been thinking about this month’s GLAM Blog Club theme (‘invalid’) all month, though as usual I’m writing this post with hours to spare. ‘Invalid’ is one of those neat words with two pronunciations and two different, but related, meanings. ˈɪnvəlɪd. ɪnˈvalɪd. Which to write about? This year I’ve been both, but together they characterise something else: a lack of agency.

Events of this cursed year have robbed us of our agency: collectively isolated, forbidden by law to leave home unless for a specified purpose, unable to live our lives in ways we might ourselves choose. These events didn’t necessarily invalidate us, but they did invalid a lot of us, directly and indirectly. I’ve spent almost all year being an invalid to varying degrees. I’ve needed a lot of looking after. I’ve thought a lot about the rights and abilities of the chronically ill and disabled to make decisions about our own lives. I consider myself lucky to have retained those rights when they counted, but there’s a lot I couldn’t do, and it frustrated me deeply.

My illness conspired to strip me of my agency. So did my work, in a way.

It’s taken me a long time to realise this about cataloguing. I suspect it didn’t quite catalyse until I moved roles last week, where I now work with metadata very differently. I had no control over the material I processed—being in the legal deposit business meant I catalogued whatever turned up in the post—and no control over any of the structures, systems or standards that governed my work. We’ve all heard cataloguing described as ‘glorified data entry’, yet cataloguers have virtually no say in the design of the form, or how their painstakingly-entered data is used.

The thing is, though, it wasn’t always like this. Cataloguers designed traditional catalogue cards and wrote maddeningly specific rules on how to squeeze as much information as possible on a three-by-five-inch index card. Cataloguers devised added entries and filing rules. From this angle, it feels like the cataloguers of yesteryear had far greater agency over their work. Cataloguing rules were still necessary (and strictly enforced), but there was far greater scope and possibility for local practices, as locally-produced cards weren’t often distributed beyond their immediate library. More to the point, this structural work was conducted by cataloguers themselves, and it feels as if there were more opportunities to shape cataloguing policies at various levels.

Modern library systems are very different. It feels like there is no overlap whatsoever between system designers, system developers, and system data managers. Our data formats, our descriptive standards, our implementation policies, our controlled vocabularies, our classification systems: none of these are up to us. The advent of library automation in the latter half of the 20th century brought computer science into libraries, and with it computer scientists and IT professionals. People, usually men, with very different ideas about data and a dislinclination to listen to those who’ve been there before. Our sphere of influence shrank as our data and systems were ruthlessly standardised—by other people, who were suddenly more ‘technical’ than we were.

You’d be forgiven for guffawing slightly at this point, muttering something about cataloguers being on a power trip. Certainly the stereotype of cataloguers as rules-obsessed authority control freaks has some merit behind it. But I’ve come to understand that many cataloguers are like this because it’s just about the only aspect of their work that they can control. For many people, blindly enforcing cataloguing rules with scant regard for local sensitivities is the only agency they have left.

Contemporary cataloguing practice is characterised by a lack of influence over what data to record, how that data is processed and displayed, and the extent to which that data is shared. It doesn’t invalidate our data, but it does call into question how cataloguers can best fulfil their professional responsibilities. I want to be clear that this is a systemic problem, by no means unique to me and my career history. But I do wonder if other metadata librarians feel this as keenly as I have. Do others chafe against a monolithic metadata enterprise over which they have zero control? Does the supposed interoperability of our data instead consign it to irrelevance? Does our drive for efficiency compromise our values? Would our libraries be better if library workers had greater control over their data systems?

I’m lucky to be in a better place now. My new job grants me considerable agency, my health continues to gradually improve, and my bad days now are still better than my good days three months ago. But I’ve been an ˈɪnvəlɪd, an ill person, working with ɪnˈvalɪd data, which didn’t fit the system. For much of this year I had almost no agency in either my personal or professional life. It’s hard to live like that. I hope not to make a habit of it, but there’s a lot beyond my control.

How to catalogue a jigsaw puzzle

Posted on by Alissa

Two puzzle boxes stacked on top of each other: Rachael Sarra's Diverse Women and Wim Delvoye's Cloaca jigsaw puzzle

It’s been a while since I catalogued much of anything, so it’s quite nice to be (intermittently) back in the office doing this work. I would have been happy enough dealing with the usual print monographs, but recently two jigsaw puzzles wound up on my desk: one featuring a beautiful contemporary Aboriginal artwork, Diverse Women, and the other featuring the infamous mechanical stomach at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Cloaca Professional. My boss knows I love cataloguing weird stuff and also nobody else wanted to deal with these for some reason, so I volunteered to take one for the team.

The majority of our jigsaw puzzle collection, if it can really be called that, is either cartographic (map-based) or an added extra that came with a book. These two puzzles were neither of those things, so there wasn’t a whole lot of precedent in the collection for how best to process them. I had a peek at the OLAC guidelines but was hoping for something a bit more accessible, so I thought I might as well write it myself. Besides, when the next jigsaw inevitably winds up on my (or your) desk this way perhaps we’ll be a little bit consistent. (I also figured I could shoehorn this into this month’s GLAM Blog Club theme, ‘Discovery’.)

As always, these observations are all mine and not those of my employer. I swear I’m not writing blog posts on company time, honest.

Fixed fields

Fortunately someone scrounged up for me a cataloguing template for jigsaw puzzles. Unfortunately this template was really intended for map-based jigsaws, and as such was coded as a cartographic resource (‘m’ in LDR/08). In my mind regular jigsaws are realia, so I coded these records as such (‘r’ in LDR/08), taking out the map-specific fields as I went.

I learned that the 008 for cartographic resources has a specific byte for jigsaws (‘l’ in 008/73). The 008 for realia1, however, is less specific; I settled on coding these as ‘games’ (‘g’ in 008/23), which apparently includes puzzles. This seems an unfortunate gap, but I was unwilling to add a cartographic 006 field just for this one byte, as it has a negligible impact on discovery. Also neither of these things are maps.

Title and access points

Both puzzle boxes featured easily identifiable titles, recorded in a 245 as usual: $a Diverse women and $a Cloaca jigsaw puzzle.

Access points, however, were trickier. A quick Google for ‘Rachel Sarra diverse women’ only returned results that related to the puzzle, which implied that Diverse Women was primarily intended for release as a puzzle, and existed publicly only in this form. I contrasted this with Cloaca Professional, which was already well-known as a public artwork, and of which a photograph was used for the Cloaca jigsaw. Diverse Women artist Rachael Sarra was credited on the puzzle box (garnering a 245 $c); so was Cloaca Professional creator Wim Delvoye, but as that artwork’s creator, not of the puzzle itself.

This suggested to me that the Diverse Women jigsaw is a standalone work, while the Cloaca jigsaw is a derivative work of a different, pre-existing (art)work. I gave Rachael Sarra the 100 field (with the $e artist reationship designator) and was going to only give Wim Delvoye the 700 field (as part of a name/title authorised access point; that is, $a Delvoye, Wim, 1965- $t Cloaca professional), but after thinking about it for way too long I decided to give him the 100 field as well in his own right, to aid discovery of his works. For some reason I kept thinking I could only give him either the 100 or the 700, but not both? I don’t know why I thought that. Perhaps I was taught it at some point.

It’s important to remember that this kind of nuanced distinction is practically meaningless for modern-day search and retrieval, but cataloguers care quite deeply about this stuff because the MARC standard forces us to. I wish it weren’t necessary.

I also gave Mona a 710 added entry, as they were intellectually responsible for the puzzle’s production. I’ve never really understood why publishers don’t get 710 fields, or why the 260/264 $b isn’t routinely indexed. I feel like that would be a useful feature. Probably too useful, I suppose.

Descriptive cataloguing

A description of the box and its contents was added in a 300 contents field. Interestingly the Diverse Women puzzle has an ISBN (a use for which this persistent identifier was probably not designed), so it went in the 020 field as usual. I did wonder if there was a controlled vocabulary for the 020 $q but the Library of Congress MARC documentation said there wasn’t, so I just made something up. Nice to be able to do that in catalogue records occasionally.

Neither puzzle gave an age range, so I didn’t include a 521 Target Audience Note (though the difficulty of Cloaca in particular suggests these are aimed at adults). However, both puzzles included specific copyright statements, which I felt it important to reproduce in a grandly-named 542 Information Relating to Copyright Status Note.

Diverse Women came with a summary on the back of the box; the Cloaca jigsaw featured one on the Mona online shop, in their trademark irreverent style. Both were duly copied into the 520 summary field.

Subject cataloguing

I admit I was initially at a loss as to how to index these puzzles, especially the Cloaca puzzle. Just how does one represent ‘jigsaw puzzle of a photograph of a mechanical digestive system’ in LCSH? For better or worse I am paid to figure out these things, eventually settling on the delightful (and new to our catalogue) ‘Scatology in art’ for Cloaca, and ‘Jigsaw puzzle art’ for Diverse Women.

The Diverse Women puzzle was additionally indexed using an AIATSIS subject heading, in line with MPOW’s cataloguing policy for First Nations materials (it’s a great policy and your library should do this too). I tossed up whether to include a heading for the Goreng Goreng people, as the box notes that Rachel is a Goreng Goreng woman but the resource isn’t strictly about the Goreng Goreng. As a white woman I’m not the best person to be making that decision, but I also didn’t want to bother my Indigenous colleagues about every single little thing related to cataloguing Indigenous resources. I ultimately decided not to include the heading, choosing instead to fully transcribe the artist credits on the box in the 245 $c. if a future cataloguer disagrees, they can always add the heading in later.

The Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms vocabulary features the term ‘Jigsaw puzzles’, so that was included in a 655 field in each record. MPOW doesn’t routinely use the 380 Form of Work field and it’s not indexed in our system, but you could use this field instead if you prefer.

Sample records

These may or may not precisely match what’s on the ANBD, but should give you a pretty good idea of what goes where. (I reserve the right to edit these later and fix my inevitable errors, haha.)2

Puzzle 1: Diverse women / Rachael Sarra

=LDR  01351crm a2200277 i 4500
=001  8536424
=005  20200924170121.0
=008  200924s2020\\\\vrannn\\\\\\\\\\\\rneng\\
=020  \\$a9781741177480$qpuzzle box
=040  \\$aANL$beng$erda
=042  \\$aanuc
=043  \\$au-at---
=100  1\$aSarra, Rachael,$eartist.
=245  10$aDiverse women /$cartist: Rachael Sarra (Goreng Goreng).
=264  \1$a[Richmond, Victoria] :$bHardie Grant Travel,$c2020.
=264  \4$c©2020
=300  \\$a1 jigsaw puzzle (1000 pieces) :$bcardboard, colour ;$c69 x 49 cm, 
          in box 33 x 23 x 5 cm
=336  \\$athree-dimensional form$2rdacontent
=337  \\$aunmediated$2rdamedia
=338  \\$aobject$2rdacarrier
=500  \\$aTitle from box.
=520  \\$aThis artwork, titled Diverse Women, celebrates the energy flowing 
          through Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women of the past, 
          through to the present, and bubbling towards future generations 
          of tiddas (sisters). In Rachael's words, it 'celebrates the strength, 
          complexity and diversity of our women, while the harmonious contours 
          acknowledge the caring and nurturing nature of our women'.
=542  \\$fCopyright artwork © Rachael Sarra 2020 ; copyright concept and box design 
          © Hardie Grant Publishing 2020.
=650  \0$aJigsaw puzzle art$zAustralia.
=650  \0$aArt, Aboriginal Australian.
=650  \7$aArt - Mixed media.$2aiatsiss
=653  \\$aAustralian
=655  \7$aJigsaw puzzles.$2lcgft

Puzzle 2: Cloaca jigsaw puzzle

=LDR  01142crm a2200265 i 4500
=001  8536430
=005  20200925173602.0
=008  200924s2020\\\\tmannn\\\\\\\\\\\\rneng\\
=040  \\$aANL$beng$erda
=042  \\$aanuc
=043  \\$au-at-tm
=100  1\$aDelvoye, Wim, $d1965-$eartist.
=245  10$aCloaca jigsaw puzzle.
=264  \1$a[Berriedale, Tasmania] :$bMuseum of Old and New Art,$c2020.
=264  \4$c©2020
=300  \\$a1 jigsaw puzzle (1000 pieces) :$bcardboard, colour ;$c74 x 59 cm, 
          in box 35 x 22 x 5 cm
=336  \\$athree-dimensional form$2rdacontent
=337  \\$aunmediated$2rdamedia
=338  \\$aobject$2rdacarrier
=500  \\$aTitle from box.
=520  \\$aThe joy of puzzles is universal. So is the joy of poo. So we've brought them 
          together in joyful, crappy unison: Wim Delvoye's Cloaca Professional, aka 
          Mona's shit machine, rendered at long last in jigsaw form. 1000 pieces, 
          mostly black, takes weeks to complete-gird your posterior and settle in for 
          the long haul.
=542  \\$f© Wim Delvoye.
=650  \0$aScatology in art.
=653  \\$aAustralian
=655  \7$aJigsaw puzzles.$2lcgft
=700  1\$ibased on (work):$aDelvoye, Wim, 1965-$tCloaca professional.
=710  2\$aMuseum of Old and New Art (Tas.)
  1. Strictly speaking this is the Visual Materials 008, but it covers realia too. ↩
  2. You may notice, as I belatedly did, that Libraries Tasmania also have a copy of the Cloaca jigsaw puzzle. They did things slightly differently to me (and may have convinced me to give Wim Delvoye the 100 field) but life would be boring if we all catalogued the same way :) ↩

Out of time

Posted on by Alissa

nebula

For a few months in late March, nobody knew what day it was. For a few weeks in mid-Victoria, nobody knows what August it is. I worry that further lockdown has warped the spacetime of greater Melbourne, that they will emerge from this black hole slightly older than the rest of us. As Westerners, we’re not used to this. But time has always been a malleable thing.

Industrialised society rather fancied itself the master of time. Clocks enabled the division of time into ever-smaller portions, into which workers were expected to cram ever-greater amounts of work. Watches, and later mobile phones, ensured we could always know our exact temporal position. I hate them, honestly. A year ago from a friend I borrowed 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, a polemic on the possibilities of chronotopic anti-capitalism. Sadly I only ever got halfway through; the dense, archaic prose had put me to sleep.

We speak of the beforetimes as a distinct epoch: a time where time made sense to us. As we were forced to abandon our daily routines, so we also lost our larger-scale markers of time—commuting to work, a midday meal, after-school pickup. Five of those in a week and we’ve made it to the weekend. Without those markers, every day was a weekend. But every day was also a work day. Every day was all the time. And the news became ever more deranged.

Yet the autumn leaves kept falling. Temperatures kept dropping. Day-lengths kept shortening. Time moved on, regardless. But we didn’t feel it that way.

I have a complicated relationship with time. For one thing, it doesn’t move in a straight line like most people think it does. Time forms great circles across the cosmos, guiding the Earth and all its lifeforms in cycles lasting many thousands of years. We’re all familiar with timelines, but such diagrams are deceptively linear, overly short and fixated on dates.

One of the hallmarks of my depression is that I lose the ability to see into the future: the worse the illness, the shorter the timescale. Life beyond is unknowable, hidden behind an impenetrable fog, as if time will simply cease to exist. My future has felt as long as five decades and as short as five minutes. There is no such thing as forever.

Perhaps it’s because I experienced both times at the same time, but to me corona time felt very similar to depression time. There is no real future, just an eternal present. Everything is too much. Seconds last for hours. Days last for weeks. We are dislocated from our regular chronologies. We feel temporally seasick. We struggle, though we don’t realise it, to weave ourselves back into the fabric of time. We yearn for something that might reconnect us with a greater existence. The key difference, of course, being that everyone else is experiencing corona time too, and they’re not used to time behaving this way.

A lot of people have written a lot about pandemic time, but they are mostly people for whom time was always already linear. A crucial exception: Diné poet Jake Skeets, whose expansive piece ‘The Other House’ speaks to Indigenous temporalities and cosmologies in our times of apocalypse.

Two years ago, when the world shrank to the size of my bedroom and I was utterly convinced that there would be no next year, I found deep comfort in the idea of deep time. I saw, to paraphrase Anna Spargo-Ryan, the fabric of time split in front of my eyes while I waited for help that never came. (It never came because I never asked; our society expects those least capable of self-reliance and self-advocacy to do these exact things in their darkest moments.) I found myself at the bottom of a large temporal hole, terrified into oblivion by the horrors of climate catastrophe. I lost all perspective of what had already happened, and what still awaited us. Time existed in zero dimensions.

Recovering from depression is an exercise in lengthening time, in re-placing oneself within and across the cosmos. I found solace in deep histories spanning tens of thousands of years. Knowing someone’s ancestors had walked this land for that long; knowing my own ancestors had walked faraway lands for almost as long. I felt part of something much greater than my own tiny golden speck of existence. It was a comfort to know the stars had been here long before me, and would be here long after me, too.

It may seem disjointed from the current Melburnian folk horror, the fear of being trapped in time, of being forgotten by the wider world, of existing in too tightly wound a time loop, of ‘living a life that resembles death’. It might feel like the darkest timeline, but there is hope to be found in our tangle of loose temporal threads. Perhaps, as Skeets writes, ‘maybe an answer lies within the reimagining of hope through the reimagining of time’.

The martyr complex

Posted on by Alissa

I agree with Brooke Reid about many things, but this in particular is a standout:

Brooke lost her casual academic library job thanks to coronavirus. (You should hire her, she’s great.) After a month off sick I’ve been working remotely now for two weeks, but I don’t yet feel as if I’ve fully ‘returned’ to librarianship. Or the world at large. Besides, what is there for many of us to return to?

Recently the Guardian Australia saw fit to run this deeply mediocre article on Australian libraries in lockdown and their impact on digitally disadvantaged people. (Fun fact: I went to high school with the author, though she likely wouldn’t remember me, and I’m disappointed to see this kind of thing from her.)

The library user interviewed, who relies on her local public library for internet access, reckons that ‘Really, there’s not as much traffic as you might think. Maybe just open the library without storytime’. I imagine you’re as disinclined as I am to take her advice on the subject. Meanwhile the only comment from a library worker (from SLNSW) is buried near the end of the piece, as if his (entirely correct) view that ‘public libraries are very busy public places […] under the current circumstances compliance with health orders is necessary’ was outweighed by the sheer inconvenience caused by such compliance.

The digital divide, like so much else in society, is largely a matter of public policy. Home internet access is not considered a basic utility, like running water and electricity, but rather a luxury for the better-off, and is priced accordingly. Try as it might, the library cannot possibly solve these kinds of policy problems. We offer internet access as a public service and as part of our commitment to freedom of information, but society shouldn’t force disadvantaged people to rely exclusively on our services. Contemporary libraries are public policy spakfilla—we are routinely expected to fill gaps left by policymakers at higher levels. Spakfilla is good for filling holes in plasterboard, but it won’t fix rotting foundations.

In 2006, my teenage life was rather more similar to that of the library user interviewed by the Guardian. My family couldn’t afford to get a landline phone connected, never mind the internet, and I refused to get a mobile because deep down I was a bit of a Luddite, and I didn’t particularly want to be contactable. Outside of school, my internet access was a weekly hour at the local public library. But had a pandemic struck that year, in those circumstances, I would have felt the library’s loss far more keenly. I would probably have watched far more television and been kept home from school, but also probably have fallen far behind in class, and been even more deeply isolated than I am now. Mum’s line of work is difficult to do remotely. I don’t know how we would be coping at the moment without the excellent home broadband we now enjoy.

In some ways, I chose to self-isolate as a teenager. But being too poor to afford the internet was not our fault, nor is it the fault of any other library user. Disadvantaged people deserve far more than just access to a public library—and when that access is rendered impossible, they should not be left to make do with nothing. Physical isolation is hard enough. Social and information isolation is even harder.

Faced with the prospect of extended building closures, many libraries have duly pivoted to making their physical collections available in other ways, with a combination of click and collect, home delivery and postal delivery services. The American Library Journal featured a brilliant op-ed the other day on why click and collect in particular, or ‘curbside pickup’, is a bad idea. It says everything I would have said on the topic, but I think this part is worth detailed consideration:

When folks are getting curbside meals, they aren’t eating the food, then returning the container to the restaurant to be used by another person. Moreover, food workers are trained in and regulated on avoiding contamination, and their workplaces are set up to prevent it. None of those things are true of libraries. Finally, restaurants are not doing delivery and pickup because there is no risk, but because the risk is outweighed by the daily need to eat. That simply isn’t true of access to physical library books. Books and other media are incredibly important, but they are not a priority right now—keeping people alive, safe, and at home is.

I would only add that restaurants and other food outlets are also relying on takeaway and deliveries to remain solvent—libraries are by and large not cost-recovery enterprises, so we don’t have this problem.

A few short weeks ago, when I was seriously ill on my own, I had a lot of deeply conflicting ethical opinions on whether I should get pizza delivered. What right did I have to demand someone else leave the house so that I didn’t have to? Would I be forcing the delivery person to take unacceptable health risks, or would my custom instead be helping keep them employed? It’s a moot point now—I ultimately did get pizza delivered, though it didn’t agree with my insides, and I promptly threw it all up—but it reveals the class issues at the heart of it all. Many people able to work from home are white collar professionals. Many people unable to work from home are blue collar or gig economy workers. They are expected to risk themselves so that others might stay safe, but they’re not necessarily getting paid (or being suitably protected) for that risk.

In setting up book retrieval and delivery services, libraries are expecting people (be they library workers, library users, or both) to risk their health for a bibliographic reward. Someone has to leave their house to retrieve books. Someone else has to collect them, or another someone has to deliver them. None of those people are likely to have, or be provided with, adequate personal protective equipment (PPE). To me, these all look like non-essential reasons to be leaving the house. Nobody ever died from not having a book to read, but the coronavirus can live on paper and other porous surfaces for up to 24 hours and on plastic for up to 72 hours; that’s enough for me to say ‘no’ to library books for the time being.

I get the feeling that large parts of our sector are desperate to prove their continuing value and relevance (and keep staff employed), and are bending over backwards to figure out ways to carry on as normal. I also suspect that many people are struggling with the idea that right now our physical collections and services have the potential to do more harm than good. That’s undoubtedly hard to process for people who’ve spent careers believing that librarianship is inherently good and noble work. Vocational awe is a hell of a drug.

The Library Journal article outlines ways libraries were already reaching people outside the building: ‘virtual and phone reference, ebooks and audiobooks, streaming movies, newspapers, databases, online programs, and more’. The immediately obvious problem? Most of these rely on people having personal internet access, which as I’ve outlined above is not an option for many. More needs to be done to figure out how to reach people while staying safe at home. The public health situation is undoubtedly far graver in the United States, where people are increasingly having to take matters into their own hands. But I have a hard time believing library books anywhere at the moment are worth that level of risk. Besides, there’s plenty that suitably online library workers could be doing from home. I hear catalogue maintenance is suddenly back in fashion.

You know what, though? Honestly, when all this is over, I don’t want to go back to normal. Normal was boring. Normal was unjust. Normal was killing me softly. Now is our big chance—our free space—to design a new normal, both within and beyond librarianship. Now is the perfect opportunity to deeply consider why we do things (not just the what and the how). Now is the time to imagine what kind of world we want to live in. The first step towards great change is believing that such change is possible. Besides, ‘things cannot and will not go back to the way they were. Of this even our enemies are certain.’

For starters, there is an obvious need for more, and more critical, library sector commentators in Australia. LIS academics would be well-placed for this kind of work, but appear largely uninterested in actively critiquing—and thereby improving—the library sector. Virtually all public librarians are government employees and do not enjoy the necessary academic or intellectual freedom. I am one of those people. That’s the price I pay for a secure job in my field. Already this post sails close to the wind of Things My Employment Precludes Me From Having Public Opinions On. But who else will point out that the emperor has no clothes?

ALIA were notably absent from the Guardian article—I suspect they simply weren’t asked for comment—but it has been evident for a long time that ALIA stands with library institutions, not library workers. The most recent ALIA Board message of Friday 24 April only confirms it: sympathy is shown for library managers having to stand down staff, but not for the staff themselves, despite ALIA’s considerable investment in a relief fund. Readers are also told that ‘we [all] have a responsibility to the library brand’, as if marketing and PR should be anyone’s priority right now. A previous message expressed concern that very few libraries and their staff would be eligible for JobKeeper, potentially putting large numbers of library workers out of work. Yet ALIA was seemingly not prepared to stand up for library workers and lobby for changes to the eligibility criteria, instead merely endorsing such efforts from unions and the Australian Local Government Association. I’m not entirely sure what these regular Board messages are meant to achieve. I don’t find them terribly reassuring.

In the face of all this, we have limited avenues to organise our labour as a sector, and fight for better. Library workers in Australia are unionised according to their employer type: government, schools, hospitals, higher education, and so on. The idea of ‘one big library union’ is not new; in fact, ALIA’s initial predecessor, the Australian Institute of Librarians (AIL), explored the possibility during its early years but could not overcome jurisdictional issues, noting that ‘A further obstacle was the opening of LAA [Library Association of Australia, AIL’s successor body] membership to employers as well as employees’. Overseas, Canadian rabble-rouser Sam Popowich has made some salient points, while the American Library Association’s companion body, the ALA-APA, exists in part to advance library workers’ salary interests. The closest thing I can think of to a pan-GLAM workers’ association in this country is newCardigan, but their reach is limited, and they lack the formal powers of a trade union.

In the past I have criticised libraries and library managers for being overly risk-averse. Now I find myself criticising them for not being risk-averse enough. It’s a strange state of affairs. I won’t pretend there are easy answers to any of these issues. But I’m also not interested in developing a martyr complex or smothering myself in vocational awe. Librarianship is important, and I appreciate many people are missing their library terribly, but right now providing access to physical collections runs the risk of spreading the virus, and library users being solely reliant on our internet access is a failure of public policy. Ours is not—and should not be—a life-or-death profession. We’re not frontline health workers. We’re not supermarket workers. We’re library workers. It’s great to be a library worker, but it ain’t everything, and it’s not worth risking public health for.

Putting the ‘tech’ back into technical services

Posted on by Alissa

This month’s GLAM Blog Club theme is the delightfully adaptable ‘question’. Next month’s #auslibchat theme is the equally interesting ‘Library Roles’. These have both wound up being quite timely, for reasons I probably shouldn’t discuss on the open internet, but I do have some questions about my role as a librarian with a technical bent.

I’m trying to get out of my perfectionist shell, so these are more free-flowing thoughts than I would normally commit to pixels. I should also mention I had a coconut margarita for dinner this evening, and I’m in a bit of a mood.

Back in the olden days, back-of-house library functions like cataloguing, acquisitions, et cetera were broadly known as ‘technical services’. When I started in libraries just over four years ago this term baffled me. I supposedly worked in this kind of area, but it felt like a hangover phrase from The Time Before Computers. Nothing ‘technical’ about serials check-in, I thought. Technical people worked in the systems department. Or in web publishing. Or in IT, which sat outside the library itself.

Four roles and three workplaces later, I still don’t work in any of those areas, but I also still don’t know how I feel about the phrase ‘technical services’. For context, I currently work as a web archivist, which is easily one of the best and coolest jobs I will ever have. I have the rare pleasure of a role that combines curatorial, technical and metadata aspects, in a team full of good people who know their stuff. I love (almost) every second. I haven’t been this happy at work since I spent 5 1/2 years running an ice-cream shop on weekends. I’ve been meaning to blog for ages about how awesome my current job is. I should get on that.

It’s not part of what would be traditionally considered ‘technical services’, though to my knowledge MPOW have never used this phrase, but it involves a lot of highly technical work, dealing with the endless ways people create and structure websites, and how our crawling software copes (or not) with the variety of the Web. If nothing else, this role has been quite the crash course in HTML, CSS and Javascript. My previous role as a cataloguer was technical in a very different sense—learning an arcane encoding standard so that I might apply a set of equally arcane descriptive policies.

Notably, I am the only woman in a team of five people, and it’s taken some getting used to. Anecdotally, cataloguing and other ‘technical services’ are female-dominated, with a greater proportion of people from non-Anglo backgrounds (mostly due to the need for vernacular language skills). Yet library IT, like IT everywhere, is male-dominated. It’s not good enough for organisations like ALIA to blithely state that the LIS sector needs to hire more men. We need to look at the distribution of genders within the sector. IT pays good money. Cataloguing doesn’t. Librarianship has historically been a feminised profession, an ‘acceptable’ career path for women. It’s hard not to wonder whether tech services would be taken more seriously if more men were doing it.

But I also wonder whether I got into librarianship because it seemed like a safe and acceptable way for me, a white woman, to be technical. Being a systems thinker, I’ve always looked at how things work together, taking a broad view of the forest and its ecosystem while also occasionally delighting in a particular tree. Libraries are just one big system, right? But that system has to be meaningful to people, too, and it’s what I find most interesting about being a cataloguer.

As a technically-minded librarian I often feel like I inhabit a kind of liminal space. I don’t feel technical enough for IT—largely because I’m not much of a coder—yet I feel almost too technical for a lot of library work. Most library jobs these days are not conceived as being ‘technical’ roles. Library schools push a front-of-house mindset almost from day one. My study visit cohort were firmly told what attributes we needed in order to succeed in libraries, and I didn’t feel like I had any of them. I was a natural introvert, not very good at people, quite fond of books and reading thanks, drawn to computers and systems. I vividly remember walking the streets of suburban Perth on the brink of tears because I felt like I didn’t fit the mould the lecturer had set for us. I spent the rest of the visit wondering whether I had made the biggest mistake of my life by enrolling in library school. I seriously considered giving it all away.

I know now, of course, that the lecturer was rude, crude and totally wrong. I do have what it takes to be a librarian. Just not the kind of librarian she was thinking of. But the idea persists that librarians are not technical people, or that the heart of librarianship is not—or should not—be a technical one. We’ve been technical for decades. We were one of the first professions to embrace the possibilities of automation. (We’re still dealing with some of those possibilities now. Ask any cataloguer about whether MARC has died yet.) What happened to that? Where did that power go? Where has that technical skill and ability ended up? And why has the section known as ‘technical services’ not been at the centre of this change?

Too library for the tech staff, too techy for the library. It’s hard not to feel as if I will one day be made to choose between them.

And I will refuse to choose.

Our profession needs all the techy librarians it can get. People who speak library AND speak IT. People with the ethical grounding of librarianship, who may or may not work back-of-house, but who can also critically assess and use technology, ensuring it functions in accordance with the values of this profession. No siloing. No separating. No boundaries. And I say all this not just because I’m on the committee of VALA, a library technology organisation that was literally founded to bring librarians and technologists together, nor because I’m trying to shore up my own career prospects in an uncertain world. I say this because I want library automation to happen BY us, not TO us. I want librarians to be able to take control of their own technological destinies. I want equitable cataloguing to be supported by equitable systems. I want us to be able to speak tech, so we can either tell tech what to do, or feel suitably empowered to do it ourselves.

It’s not technical services as we’ve traditionally known it. But a lot of library traditions are changing.

It’s time to question them all.

Cataloguing as a (customer) service

Posted on by Alissa

A librarian’s innate desire to help is often redirected into a desire to provide great customer service. That is, until what constitutes ‘customer service’ changes, and suddenly what some kinds of librarians do isn’t considered ‘helpful’ enough. I’m sure I had something else in mind when I suggested the theme ‘help’ for GLAM Blog Club. But one of Danielle’s tweets today set a different set of cogs in motion:

After a short back-and-forth, Hugh responded:

To which I added:

A public library director once told me to my face that he wasn’t interested in hiring cataloguers. I don’t recall exactly how he phrased his justification (though I do recall my response being ‘I’m sorry to hear that’) but he clearly conceptualised his library as a ‘customer service’ organisation, where that phrase meant ‘an exclusive focus on front-of-house activities and services’. Collection development, systems administration and cataloguing, collectively ‘technical services’ in library parlance, are not commonly viewed as opportunities for great customer service. Instead they’re seen as something that can (and should) be outsourced in the interests of ‘efficiency’.

Brisbane City Council Library Service abolished their in-house tech services department twenty years ago and, oddly, chose to present about it at the 13th National Cataloguing Conference. The library moved entirely to shelf-ready stock and turfed all their cataloguers.1 The writeup in Cataloguing Australia notes (emphasis mine):

This driver of customer service is paramount at Brisbane City Council and Library Services. All our restructuring and re-engineering has been predicated on the assumption that it will provide better customer service and responsiveness. The wider implication of no longer having a Technical Services Section is that Library Services is now solely a customer service branch. There is no longer a back room mentality, and the expectation is that staff spend 80% of their working day in direct customer service.2

To be fair, a typical late-nineties tech services department probably wasn’t all that user-focused. But I reckon it could have been, if management had chosen to imbue that customer service ethos into all areas of library administration, not just the face-to-face parts. I can see I’ll be shouting ‘CATALOGUING IS POWER’ until the day I die. I’ll never understand why so many libraries, especially public libraries, willingly throw this power away. What do we lose from ‘efficiency’? What do we lose, when we lose the people who are paid to care?

I have worked for, patronised, and otherwise dealt with far too many libraries that are not resourced to care about the integrity and usefulness of their metadata, collections or systems. These things are clearly not prioritised by decision-makers, and so they are outsourced, often with little oversight. This is not good customer service. This does not help. Having a crappy website or an unusuable catalogue sends a strong message that the only patrons the library cares about are those accessing the library in person. Has the internet taught us nothing? Have twenty-plus years of ‘everything is online now’ not compelled us to create the best online presences possible for our libraries? To curate the best online and electronic collections? To boost our SEO (search engine optimisation) using well-structured, highly detailed metadata? To develop and deploy systems that don’t make people jump through endless hoops, divulge their personal data, or give up entirely in frustration and turn to a paid competitor? Why do I know so many librarians who use Audible instead of Overdrive? Who are we really competing against?

I abhor the practice of referring to library users as ‘customers’. Customers, by definition, purchase. The library has nothing to sell. The library invites the community it serves to make use of its facilities, collections and knowledge. These services are not without cost, but they are, proudly, free to the user. In lieu of ‘customer’, I prefer the term ‘library user’ or sometimes ‘patron’. The library I work for uses ‘reader’, supposing the majority of our visitors are, in fact, here to read.

Save for the two hours a week I choose to spend on a reference desk, my job is not directly user-facing. But it is user-focused. Everything I do as a librarian, I do for my library’s users (and, through the power of co-operative cataloguing, the users of hundreds of other libraries). I don’t catalogue for the catalogue’s sake. I catalogue so people can find things. Most people will never know how my cataloguing has helped them. I’m okay with that. I don’t need to be sitting in front of a library user for my work, and my help, to be valuable.

The above-mentioned issue of Cataloguing Australia, the journal’s last, also featured a paper from the then-Customer Services Manager at CAVAL. To my surprise and absolute delight, she took a similar view to me of customer service and cataloguing:

Let me begin, as we should all begin, by looking at our customers. Even if we never see them, we should never forget who they are. […] When you are making a map of the heavens, you need to be aware of whether you are doing this for a child, an astrologer, a serious astronomer or a Star Trek fan. Each one of those maps is useless to any of the other groups. So, too, with our catalogue records. For our customers are infinitely more varied than those for star maps.3

The entire article is a joy.4 It’s full of sensible, user-focused thinking (seemingly a rarity in 1999) and it’s easily my new favourite piece of professional literature. But I’m intrigued by the fact it came from a vendor. By outsourcing so much of our technical services work, has our sector also outsourced the capacity to think of this work as inherently ‘customer’-focused? A vendor’s ‘customers’ are libraries themselves—does this change a catalogue record’s intended audience?

A tech services worker might ask ‘How can I help?’, as I so often greet people on the desk, but libraries need to be structurally capable of accepting that help, and cultivating it in-house. By reframing our conception of cataloguing as an inherently user-focused (or customer-focused) activity, libraries can ensure we’re providing the right metadata to create the right map, in order to help the right people find the right materials. After all, we’re here to help.

  1. The author mentions ‘we now have no cataloguers on our staff’ so I guess they were either made redundant or reassigned to other, non-cataloguing duties, though two staff were put in charge of quality checking vendor records. ↩
  2. Mackenzie, Christine. (1999). ‘The end of the world as we know it? Outsourcing at Brisbane City Council Library Service’. Cataloguing Australia 25(1/4), pp. 184-187. ↩
  3. Dearman, Rosemary. (1999). ‘Whose information universe? Customer services and cataloguing’. Cataloguing Australia 25(1/4), pp. 222-231. ↩
  4. Sadly it’s not online :( ↩

Irradicalism

Posted on by Alissa

My Twitter bio currently describes me as ‘a radical cataloguer’. It seemed apt at the time: a neat way of summing up who I am, what I do, and what I stand for. But now, thanks to this month’s GLAM Blog Club theme and a well-timed lunch with noted incendiary librarian Hugh, I’m having second thoughts about this whole ‘radical’ thing.

Now, this doesn’t mean changing my professional or political views, as strident and idiosyncratic as they are. It means rethinking what the word ‘radical’ actually means to me. What is radical, really?

Successive linguistics lecturers drilled into me the lesson that etymology is not semantics. A word’s origins may bear no relation to its current meaning. And yet being ‘radical’ entails, literally, going back to our roots. To consider the core or essence of something. The word came to English via the Latin radicalis, the adjectival form of radix, ‘root’. English regards Latin as an adstratum language, a more prestigious tongue from which we borrow liberally in an effort to appear learned. I suspect this desire to appear somewhat educated is why I ultimately settled on a Classics major.

I was going to talk briefly about ‘contemporary radicalism’ but realised I had no idea what that looked like. Different people, depending on their own views, will describe other views as ‘radical’. I wonder whether being ‘radical’ is more of a relative than an absolute phenomenon; that is, the description depends less on the viewpoint itself than on what surrounds it. I know the kinds of things I would consider ‘radical’ have changed dramatically over the last couple of years. That is, the things themselves haven’t changed, but my perception definitely has.

As I experienced what I can only describe as an ecological awakening over the last eighteen months or so (starting with David Wallace-Wells’ absolutely terrifying article ‘The Uninhabitable Earth‘, now expanded into a book I’m too scared to read), I made what most people would consider some fairly radical life choices. In particular, I stopped flying. I’ve done a lot of interstate travelling this year, all of it by train, bus or ferry. I’m very aware that the planes kept flying without me. But I decided to put my money where my mouth was, and financially support more sustainable forms of transport. It feels less radical, and more necessary, with each passing day.

I read an article just today on what climate scientists do to live more sustainable lives. Forsaking air travel was on almost everyone’s mind. If more people start doing something, does it inherently become less radical? Might we start to see greater shifts in what broader society considers ‘normal’, against which the ‘radical’ is compared?

Besides, can you really call yourself ‘radical’ with a straight face? I wonder if it’s like calling yourself an ‘ally’ to a marginalised or oppressed class of people. You don’t get to decide whether you’re an ally or not. They do, when your actions have spoken loud enough. It’s not a permanent adjective. It’s not a badge you get to keep. It’s something you do, not something you are. A continual state of mind and being, not a fixed point in time.

I look at the kind of work I do in libraries, at so-called ‘radical cataloguing’. I’ll be touching on this in my upcoming NLS9 talk (spoiler!) but while many people both inside and outside library land might look at my cataloguing ethos and go ‘Oof, that’s pretty radical’, I’m increasingly convinced that nothing I do in libraries should be considered radical at all. It only feels radical because it’s seemingly so unusual. Thinking of metadata and systems librarianship as not just user-centred, but user-facing. Recognising the cataloguer’s power to name and actively looking to cede that power to the people and groups we describe. Encouraging critical viewpoints of—and within—the catalogue. This shouldn’t be radical. This should be completely normal.

But what if it becomes normal? What, then, would be considered ‘radical’? If radicalism is relative, what new, progressive, revolutionary ideas might emerge, in our sector and in many others?

I genuinely can’t wait to find out. But first, the Overland train to Adelaide on Tuesday. And perhaps a new Twitter bio.

The introvert’s megaphone

Posted on by Alissa
Tag yourself, I’m the fail whale. (From an image by Yiying Liu)

I can’t remember exactly why I joined Twitter. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ve been on that website in one form or another since 2009, mostly to lurk behind locked accounts, but in October 2015 I decided to start tweeting for real. I was partway through my library degree, I had recently begun my first job in a library (albeit in an admin role) and I think I was feeling somewhat isolated. I’m sure my lecturers mentioned Twitter was where all the library conversations were happening. So I decided to join in.

Still #onbrand after all these years.

(For those wondering where my handle came from: I think I spotted someone else’s typo somewhere and ran with it. People address me as ‘lissertations’ all the time. I have no issue with it. ?)

Three-and-a-half years and over 14,000 tweets later, I’d like to think it was worth it. Saying ‘I have learned so much from other people on twitter’ feels hollow. It has completely transformed my ways of seeing and thinking about the world, about librarianship, about our past and our future. I’ve read so many insightful articles, posted by so many incredible people. I thought I had a handle on how the world ought to work. Boy, was I wrong.

Twitter has long been touted as the social network of choice for library and information workers, but different people use it in different ways. You’ve got your lurkers, your occasional users, your influencers, your trolls, your personal brand maintainers, your organisational accounts that shitpost more often than they realpost, your crossposters from Linkedin or Instagram, your ‘I only tweet at conferences’ types, your backchannellers, your agitators, your real people, your fake people, your twitterbots. I probably fall into several of those categories, but above all else I try to be honest online. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. I have always been an opinionated introvert, but too often the opinions can get lost in IRL networking situations because people are hard and scary. Twitter has helped me to network and communicate with an audience that doesn’t need to know I’m an introvert. For me, it’s the perfect megaphone.

I am acutely aware that at this point I basically owe my career to this platform. Because of Twitter, thousands of people know who I am, hundreds of people have read my blog posts or heard me speak, dozens of people have met me at conferences, a handful of people have become my closest friends, and at least two people have offered me employment. I absolutely would not be where I am today if it weren’t for being on Twitter. My presence there has helped me get a foot in the door, at a time when breaking into the library industry is harder than ever.

And yet I have achieved this through somewhat unconventional means. We’ve all read articles like ’15 Twitter Tips for Librarians’ and ‘Top tips for using social media for professional networking’. I’m pretty sure I’ve done everything these articles tell you not to do. I don’t use a picture of myself as my avatar (and never will), I seldom use hashtags, I have no social media strategy besides ‘these are my opinions today’, I follow whoever I want and not who the ‘influencers’ are, I tweet about all sorts of non-LIS topics (principally environmentalism), I blur the line between ‘professional’ and ‘personal’, and I overshare all the damn time.

That’s not to say you should necessarily follow my lead, or that the above articles are bad. The advice in them is simply not to my taste, with one major exception: I absolutely adhere to Kate Davis’ rule of ‘Don’t retweet without reading (unless you make it clear you haven’t read it yet)’. In this era of abundant bullshit, we have a responsibility as information professionals not to share or spread harmful, inaccurate or offensive content. All our retweets are endorsements. If I share something, I am sending a message that I vouch for its integrity. I want my word to mean something, both online and off.

Because I have become such an outsized Twitter Personality™, which I’m not sure resembles my actual personality all that much, I sometimes feel obliged to keep tweeting and maintaining a presence, even when I feel I have nothing to say. I have also found myself composing tweets in my head before I’ve even reached for my phone, rearranging an anecdote for maximum likes, retweets and dopamine hits. It’s all a bit sad, really. Aside from an extremely private Mastodon account, Twitter is the only social media I have. It’s easy to develop a certain tunnel vision when you’re on the site for too long, mindlessly scrolling because it feels weird not to. It’s easy to be a bit too online.

Some of you might be unsure about joining Twitter, considering most people these days associate it with a certain American president. I want to be clear: most of Twitter is an absolute binfire. It’s abhorrent. It’s a cesspool. It’s home to some of the worst people on the entire internet. But library twitter is different. It’s full of people who are passionate about libraries, having the best and most urgent conversations, sharing the most important ideas, making the most fruitful connections. You don’t need to be #onhere as often as I am in order to get something out of this platform. Make Twitter work for you, not the other way around, and it can help you do incredible things.