The best of #emptythepocket, issue 3

Today I realised I had 1,025 items saved to my Pocket account, which is a bit much. I wrote earlier this year about my article ecosystem, but it’s fallen apart a bit, because I never seem to get around to actually reading everything I save. I decided to clean out these items, deleting articles I was never really going to read, and sharing those that left an impression.

Architecture and Appropriation / Louis Mokak, Assemble Papers
First published in Caliper, this short piece speaks to how First Nations ‘culture is not a research topic, thematic concern or an anthropological curiosity’, yet is still treated as such by scientific lines of enquiry. The author, a Djugun architecture student, reflects on the power structures that underpin his chosen profession, and where cultural appropriation might be replaced with a more equitable exchange.

The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet / Justin Reynolds, Calvert Journal
This article on socialist cybernetics, in particular the Chilean Project Cybersyn and the Soviet OGAS, outlined how communist countries looked to emerging computing technologies to assist in centralised control of the economy. Crucially, the ‘internet’ of the title refers not to a publicly-accessible web of information, but a network of computers that would relay data on production output to central planning. They almost created a nation-wide computer network, but the Americans beat them to it, and look where that’s gotten us…

Energy Hogs: Can World’s Huge Data Centers Be Made More Efficient? / Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360
Newsflash: the internet is terrible for the environment! As I highlighted in the last #emptythepocket roundup, we as a society have collectively forgotten that ‘that ethereal place where we store our data, stream our movies, and email the world has a physical presence’. And it’s filthy. The electricity that powers cloud computing is frequently drawn from non-renewable sources, with data centres using insane amounts of energy in cooling and airconditioning. Every internet-connected keystroke has an environmental cost. We outsource so much of our data infrastructure to ‘the cloud’, and assume that someone else will take care of all that pesky maintenance and environmental sustainability for us, that most of us have no idea what the internet is doing to the planet. (I’m hoping to soon read J.R. Carpenter’s book The Gathering Cloud, an intriguing work of ‘media meteorology’.)

Librarian or librarian: Which Do You Want to Be? / Jessica Olin, Letters to a Young Librarian
Our endgame as librarians / Andrew Finegan, Bibliotheque Bound
I am hugely, immensely, absolutely guilty of being a Librarian with a capital L. And yet it’s something I’ve largely refused to feel guilty about, because that’s a decision I’ve made for myself, in deciding what I want to do with my life and how best to use my skills and talents for the greater good. But it also means I’m up to my eyeballs in Librarian Culture, and when it almost drowned me earlier this year I realised it comprised such a large chunk of Me that I didn’t quite know what was left. Like Jessica, I also don’t want to look back on my mid-twenties and regret being such a Librarian, when I could also have been (just?) a librarian, with time and energy for other things. But do I want that? Would I ever be happy not throwing myself into my work?

Andrew posted on a similar topic as I was reading Jessica’s post. Andrew and I have collectively spent a lot of time this year being capitalised Librarians, giving a shit, and pondering our respective powers and places within LIS. We can’t do it all, and we can’t do it alone, and sometimes we can’t do much of anything. But we can try, and plan, and agitate, and celebrate all successes no matter how small. And I know I can do it from the position I’m currently in—employed on a fixed-term contract, in a non-management role, in a team that doesn’t share my views on… virtually everything, with the ink still wet on my library degree, armed only with a twitter account and my wits. Nobody else will change our sector for the better, so we might as well do it ourselves. Just so long as that’s not the only thing we do. (I was also reminded of Ruth Kitchin Tillman’s code4lib editorial on being a selfish librarian, which is a good read.)

Contraflow / Clare Archibald, Walking Heads
At this point I inverted my pocket so the oldest items were at the top. The most interesting old thing was this psychogeographic drift in a multi-storey carpark. As a lifelong non-driver I rarely have cause to be in these buildings, so reading Clare’s pedestrian exploration of this car-shaped space was spooky in lots of ways. It becomes less about the carpark itself than about Clare’s memories of carparks in general, concrete and acid, cracks and headlights. Cars are awful. I don’t know why we persist with them.

‘I felt betrayed by the physical and emotional hardship’ / Agustin Chevez, SBS Insight
As a product of the Enlightenment, LIS prides itself on being a rational profession, based on truth and evidence. But what if it’s really the absurd that will save us? Recent PhD graduate Agustin Chevez found himself seized by a need to walk from Sydney to Melbourne, and decided to do so, but a month of walking had seemingly produced nothing. Tired and unsure, he stopped by the side of the road, only to realise that ‘once artificial intelligence has modelled every possible rational scenario, absurdity might surface as our last standing trait’. The absurdity of his situation liberated him, and inspired him to continue his walk. The clickbaity title does this piece a great disservice—it’s an inspiring treatise on the value of irrationality and solitude. I could do with a long walk myself…

The means to an end

you can do the thing!

I have all sorts of opinions about 2018. I anticipated that it would be a rebuilding year, that I hoped ‘to build something bigger and stronger’, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how much I might build. I figured I’d be busy, and wow was I busy! I didn’t expect to be so unwell for so much of it, but I suppose whatever hasn’t killed me has only made me stronger. I’m glad I’ve recovered, because I’ve got too much to do.

I read some incredible things this year. I read that the revolution will not be standardized. I read about what the library was, is, and will be. I read about how work makes me sick, three months before the fact. I read about the social ideology of the motorcar, and how it has crippled our cities. I read, apprehensively, about a storm blown from paradise.

I wrote some pretty good things this year, too, including a piece on fake news for inCite and a book review published in Archives and Manuscripts. I contributed a page to the first Auslib zine. I also wrote 34 blog posts, including 10 for GLAM Blog Club. I think my favourite post is actually ‘Five things I didn’t learn at #VALA2018 (because I didn’t go)’, where I discussed the experience of ‘attending’ a (brilliant) conference by lurking its hashtag, but soup day will always have a special place in my heart.

I also did a lot of PD stuff. Probably too much. I was a guest on the Turbitt & Duck podcast, where I raved for an hour about cataloguing. I gave a talk at work about web archives and document delivery. I went to coGLAMeration in Sydney, FutureGLAM in Melbourne, the ACOC seminar in Canberra, critlib school in Sydney again. I got a colonial-era Indigenous name heading changed—one small step in decolonising / Indigenising the catalogue. I was on the VALA Tech Camp committee, co-ran ACTive ALIA, was in the ALIA mentoring scheme, did #auslibchat most months. I attended three cardiParties, all interstate. I graduated with a MIS from Charles Sturt University (finally rendering me eligible for the ALIA PD scheme!) and participated in a review of their information studies courses. Oh, and I got a new job. But you all know how that went.

Most importantly, though, I met the gold-plated Chiko roll at the Museum of the Riverina. It made my whole year.

Gold-plated chiko roll
My life is complete. ? (A huge thanks to Sam for making this happen!)

Did I accomplish my goals for this year? Back in January I outlined three goals for 2018: ‘submit more papers to conferences’, ‘write more zines’ and ‘back myself’. I didn’t quite make the CILIP CIG conference in Dùn Èideann, but I was accepted to present at NLS9 next July, and I’ll be running a thing at [spoiler!] early next year. I did write a couple more zines, though they weren’t library related, and also weren’t very happy (I’d like to write happier zines next year).

But did I back myself? I had to stop and think about this one. I feel like I was better able this year to stand my ground and listen to my instincts. I didn’t talk myself out of speaking up when things weren’t going well. I also kept talking, both online and off, about aspects of professional practice that matter to me. I decided I was okay with being a notorious cataloguing personality, because I finally felt like I could back it up.

Honestly it’s no wonder I’m exhausted. So exhausted, in fact, I’m taking a holiday. I’m looking forward to shortly spending a month tootling around the countryside, doing things more slowly, extricating myself from library land for a time. I love what I do, even when it exhausts me, and I feel like this blog is a great way of documenting and communicating my work. I’m sure next year will be just as busy, but I hope to be less overwhelmed by it all. I would like more of a balance.

Lastly, I’d like to take a moment to thank, from the bottom of my heart, each and every one of you. You who read this blog, you who chat to me on twitter, you whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at PD events, you who write so well on your own blogs and twitters, you who encouraged me to do more and be more, you who were there for me when I said I wasn’t okay. You know who you are. I couldn’t have done all this without you.

Here’s to doing it all again next year… well, most of it.