Divided we stand

pile of notebooks on a desk, the topmost reading 'don't just stand there'

They say that ‘staying apart keeps us together’, but everyone I know is slowly disintegrating. I was slightly ahead of that curve, but the futures of many appear just as bleak. Most of my social circle lives in Melbourne, back in lockdown and under increasing strain. People are stressed, exhausted, weary, afraid for their health and their livelihoods. To think I almost moved there earlier this year. To think I’m now grateful I was forced to stay put.

It’s been a hard slog, though. After I got out of the psych ward in early April I spent 3 1/2 months at my mum’s place, learning how to be well again. We watched almost every episode of Great American Railroad Journeys. Mum watched a lot of Essendon football matches (especially the old ones where they won). I watched a lot of flowers bloom. Moving back into my own place a couple of weeks ago was almost an anti-anticlimax. It wasn’t the cute little flat in St Kilda I’d had my eye on, but it was still here, and for the moment, so was I.

Each person’s anxieties manifest in different ways. Until recently mine included a lot of shouting on Twitter. I need to stop doing this because it only makes the noise worse. I also have a lot less energy these days to scream into the void. I’d prefer to spend my time on more constructive pursuits.

Regular readers of this blog will recall my long-term criticism of the Australian Library and Information Association, including my unflattering appraisal of their response to the pandemic back in April. I considered not renewing my personal membership this year, and not just because for a while I couldn’t afford to pay it (though I did at one stage donate some of my renewal money to the GRLC casuals’ fund). Discontent with ALIA in Australia’s library community has simmered for some time. Library workers whose views I respect, such as Bonnie and Danielle, have chosen to leave. Others openly question the association’s choices in event management. Planning a large in-person conference for next February seems particularly foolhardy.

Despite all this I ultimately chose to renew my ALIA membership, albeit three months late. I did so for one primary reason. It wasn’t because I’m an ACORD office-bearer (and therefore obliged to hold personal membership for as long as I’m on that committee). It wasn’t because I felt my seat at the broader ALIA table was really getting me anywhere. It was because I was genuinely excited by this year’s elections to the Association’s Board of Directors. After years of waiting and wishing (and whining), I felt like we finally had some solid progressive leadership. I wanted to put my money where my mouth is and support those new Directors to start making necessary strategic change. This won’t happen overnight. It might not be anytime soon considering how much else everyone has on their plates right now. But there are some good foundations in place, and for the first time in my five years of membership I was optimistic about ALIA’s potential. I wanted to support that.

I was concerned, however, that my renewal would be interpreted as an endorsement of the status quo. I want to be very clear that it is not. My membership is an act of faith, not an act of trust.

It has also finally dawned on me that ALIA will never truly be the kind of organisation I think it should be. CEO Sue McKerracher made clear back in January (in InCite’s critlib-themed issue, no less, submissions for which were curiously never advertised) what she sees as ALIA’s core function: ‘taking the facts about libraries and shaping them to fit the interests of government’ (p. 7). Lobbying, in other words. Advocacy. Public relations. Media management. I know ALIA does quite a few other things, but lobbying appears to be its primary focus. It’s why the Association moved to Canberra in the first place. Certainly there are good reasons for librarianship to establish—and fund—such a body. I just resent funding it personally, is all. I don’t feel particularly advocated for.

ALIA put out a pamphlet-type thing recently listing some of the ways it had responded to the pandemic. Curiously, none of those ways included advocating for casualised library workers who lost all their shifts, or academic library workers facing forced pay cuts and mass redundancies, or LIS students graduating into a non-existent job market. They did encourage libraries to hire authors to do talks, which I would find more admirable had they also encouraged those libraries to not lay off their staff.

There’s a bit of a gap here. ALIA advocates for libraries as institutions, while our trade unions advocate for library workers within their workplaces. There’s no organisation that advocates for library workers as a whole, as professionals1, as workers with valuable skills, as people who deserve stable employment, as individuals who have so much to offer. So many of us are screaming ourselves hoarse, but it feels no organisation is listening. Globally, many library workers have had enough of their professional associations, and are investing in real change. Lindsey Cronk’s exhortations to #FixALA and Callan Bignoli’s #LibRev[olution] conference and subsequent organising point to a groundswell of support for radical change in the library sector. What kind of united future could we create for ourselves? How might we go about building a different kind of power?


Picture this: a national library workers’ association. A separate entity to ALIA, uniting library workers across all sectors, at all stages of their careers. One big library union, perhaps. I’m intrigued by the Danish model: in 1968 the librarians of Denmark collectively revolted against their library association and formed the Danish Union of Librarians, ‘to secure wage and working conditions and to cultivate their profession’. The union has both an industrial and a professional role, supporting librarians at work and in their careers. Meanwhile, the Danish Library Association takes the lead on lobbying and public outreach efforts. Interestingly, their org structure includes politicians as well as professionals, and one seat is reserved for a library student. It was the inclusion of the former that so riled the latter.

Australia’s industrial relations are very different, with library workers divided into unions based on their sector: schools, healthcare settings, levels of government, higher education and so on. There can be real advantages in organising with fellow workers in one’s sector, irrespective of role. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that some library workers can struggle to find appropriate union representation, including special librarians, employees of vendors, and those working outside a formal library environment.

Such a national library workers’ association could resemble the Danish model, and become a formal trade union, ensuring that all library workers could have someone in their corner. Or it could be a different kind of organisation, taking after the Casualised, Unemployed, and Precarious University Workers (CUPUW, formerly the National Higher Education Casuals Network), a cross-sectoral alliance of non-permanent university workers fighting for recognition of their worth as people and workers in the face of structural collapse. We could all start imagining what this new association might look like. Would people join under their own steam? Would we want ‘delegates’ from different library sectors or states, or specific representatives for students, casuals and the unemployed? How could we best set ourselves up for success and longevity?

Another benefit of such an association: it would enable library workers to speak publicly and collectively on issues that matter to us, rather than waiting for ALIA to do it on our behalf. I feel like a lot of us have spent a lot of time over the years trying to get ALIA to say particular things. Like many others, I was surprised and impressed by ALIA’s recent statement on Black Lives Matter. It was strongly worded, it came from ALIA directly (not its Board), and it was seemingly issued without members having to ask. I hope to see more of this kind of advocacy from ALIA. If only they’d spoken up for marriage equality like this before we begged them to.2

Brendan Bachmann wrote a searing piece on many libraries’ shameful treatment of their casual staff during the pandemic. I will note that MPOW, to its credit, has continued offering shifts to its few casual workers, and has moved heaven and earth to enable the vast majority of us to work from home. But many library workers have been treated far more poorly, and it is precisely the kind of behaviour Brendan discusses that a library workers’ association would stand against. Workers need to feel seen, to feel heard, and to feel like someone’s prepared to stick up for them. I’m realistic about the chances of policy reversal, but even just having that solidarity would make a world of difference.

Brendan is completely right. We are better than this. But we deserve better than this, too.


… It does seem to be a pattern though, doesn’t it? New librarian joins ALIA, chills for a bit, realises how cooked it is, agitates for change, gets nowhere, is crushed, leaves ALIA. Over and over.

So why have I spent so much time and energy over the years being cross at my professional association? Despite outward appearances I’m not naturally a ‘burn it all down’ kind of person. I don’t enjoy being angry all the time (in fact, I’m much worse at being angry now than in the Before Times, and it gladdens me). I’d much rather try to make things better. And generally speaking I prefer to be a member of things rather than not. It takes a lot for me to consider quitting something. I do think that ‘Together we are stronger’, to echo ALIA’s motto, but it’s time for a deeper introspection on who ‘we’ are.

I wrote in late March, a lifetime ago:

I don’t know why I keep looking to ALIA to demonstrate leadership in the Australian library sector. I don’t know why I hope they will stand up for library workers. I don’t know why I think they will change.

It’s deeply frustrating because we, as workers, want so desperately for our professional organisation to advocate for us. But ALIA doesn’t do that, and it’s not going to do that for as long as Institutional Membership is available. The conflict of interest here is insurmountable. So we need a separate association focussing on library workers. I had thought for a while that newCardigan would be ideally placed for such a role, but I would understand if they wanted to remain a radical social group rather than something more formalised. I don’t think the organisation we want really exists yet. I think it should.

I have a long personal history of sinking my time and energy into people and things that didn’t or couldn’t reciprocate. The time for that is over. If the Australian library sector is to have any hope of getting through these tough times, we as library workers need to build our own platform, and find our collective voice. Staying apart won’t always keep us together—it’s time for a national Australian library workers’ association. Let’s make it happen.


  1. Irrespective of how (or even if) such workers have degrees or other professional accreditation. 
  2. Man, this was three whole years ago and I’m still bitter about it. 

Putting my money where my mouth is

This month for GLAM Blog Club we are invited to consider what it means to ‘donate’—our time, our labour, our organs, our money. To give freely with no expectation of return. Supposedly. In practice, sums of money are moved around all the time under the cover of ‘donations’, when they’re really a method of currying favour with the powerful.

Coincidentally, my ALIA membership is up for renewal this month. Having finally gotten around to graduating at the end of last year, my membership dues are now at the ‘Associate (New Graduate)’ level, and at $199 have doubled from the ‘Student’ level dues I was previously paying. I am under no illusions that giving ALIA more money will somehow increase my influence within the organisation. They know exactly who I am. But because paying dues is a requirement of membership, it’s not really a donation. More like a payment in anticipation of services rendered.

So what services do I want? I decided to continue receiving InCite online, rather than in print (though I wouldn’t mind a copy of the issue with my face in it, I think my mum would like that). I’ll keep reading the ALIA Weekly, PD Postings and RecruitLIS newsletters. I’ll go to local ALIA events, but I’ll probably also have to help organise them, and it’s a bit disheartening when few to no people show up.

But I know my membership is not just about me. It’s about our profession as a whole. It’s about ALIA’s leadership of the Australian library sector and the tone they set for the national discourse. Their embodiment of the values and ethics of librarianship. Their support for various parts of the sector in the face of social, governmental, financial and ethical challenges.

These are the services I anticipate. I hope one day to see the ALIA CEO give a speech akin to that recently given by CILIP CEO Nick Poole. He admitted, frankly and refreshingly, that the CILIP of today is not what CILIP ought to be. He pledged to transform the UK’s library and information association into a dynamic, forward-thinking body that collectivises and amplifies the wishes and concerns of its members. ‘The work of becoming an activist organisation, an organisation that campaigns for and celebrates social justice, belongs to us all.’

ALIA is not an activist organisation. I strongly believe it should be one. And yet ALIA belongs to us all, or at least those of us who are members. It’s ultimately why I choose to remain a member, because that $199 gets me a seat at the table. I might not like much of what is being served, but I at least have the ability to demand something else. If enough of us make these demands, the menu might just change.

I also recently donated, freely and with no expectation of return, to two GLAM organisations whose values I share: the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, a community archive of LGBTIQ materials and histories based in Melbourne, and newCardigan, a progressive GLAM collective based in Melbourne and Perth. (Regular readers may be familiar with my strain of cardivangelism.) Both organisations are run by volunteers, doing good work in and for their communities, and could use any funds you can spare.

While cleaning my house earlier today I found my ALIA member’s pin, after many years of forgetting I owned one. I decided to affix it to my Badge Hat, between the ‘Libraries are not neutral’ and ‘GLAM Pride Vic’ badges. I like seeing ALIA in this context. I hope to continue seeing it in many others.

How to catalogue a podcast

The other day I decided to catalogue a podcast, mostly because Hugh gave me the idea. I cast about for a suitable work and I figured—why not catalogue cardiCast? I’m not a huge podcast listener, but I’ve really grown to enjoy the mix of live cardiParty recordings and interviews with selected guests.

Resources for cataloguing podcasts are thin on the ground, so I thought I’d share my take. This is not an officially-sanctioned, PCC-compliant guide or anything, just the views of a simple cataloguer who does this for fun.

Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Fixed fields

This is gonna get technical. Let’s look at the Leader fields, first:

LDR/07 = (i), non-musical sound recording
LDR/08 = (s), serial

There’s not a lot of records on the ANBD with that particular combination. The closest I found to a podcast record was ‘Surgical news extra’, an audio accompaniment to an existing textual serial. (The cataloguer at SLV who created this is clearly a talented individual, they did a really good job!)

As far as the cataloguer is concerned, there are three aspects to a podcast: its audio content (spoken word, non-musical sound recording); its computer content (digital file, stored and accessed online); and its seriality (continuing resource, issued in discrete episodes as part of a broader whole).

Capturing these three aspects requires a lot of fixed field data, most of which (sadly) an ILS will never use. We will need the following:

Generally speaking, “the 008 and 006 are regarded as containing “bibliographic” information about a work, while the 007 is regarded as carrying information about the “physical” characteristics of the item”. I could go into exhaustive detail about each byte, but if you really want to know you’ll have clicked on the above hyperlinks already, so why reinvent the wheel?

Two aspects of fixed field entry stood out as being particularly tricky:

  • 008/24-29, ‘Accompanying matter’ [to sound recordings]: this is really intended for physical accompaniments, not digital ones. ‘Show notes on iTunes’ doesn’t really fit any of the given options, so despite having six bytes to play with I settled for only one, ‘f’ (Biography of performer or history of ensemble), as the show notes (either in iTunes as embedded metadata or on the newCardigan website) usually have a brief explainer about who’s talking and what the topic is.
  • 008/30-31, ‘Literary text for sound recordings’: I have two bytes to fill. Here I have to think quite deeply about the nature of cardiCast. I have a reasonably good list of options, but ‘cardiParties’ isn’t one of them. Nor can I record anything specific about the live nature of many podcast recordings. I eventually settled on ‘l’ (lectures, speeches) and ‘t’ (interviews).

Title and access points

Pleasingly, the title (as spoken by Justine at the beginning of each episode) actually fits really neatly into the ISBD syntax, as transcribed in the 245 field:

[Title] $a cardiCast :
[Subtitle] $b a GLAM podcast /
[Statement of responsibility] $c brought to you by newCardigan.

I really wanted to know whether I could keep newCardigan’s distinctive camelCase in the title and access points, or whether I had to refer to the work as ‘Cardicast’ and the producer as ‘Newcardigan’. Fortunately the RDA toolkit saw my dilemma coming, and handily permits the retention of unusual capitalisation if it is the most commonly-known form.

Names of Agents and Places
A.2.1
[…]
For names with unusual capitalization, follow the capitalization of the commonly known form.
eg. eBay (Firm)

Titles of Manifestations
A.4.1
[…]
Unusual capitalization. For titles with unusual capitalization, follow the capitalization of the title as found on the source of information.
eg. eBay bargain shopping for dummies; SympoTIC ’06

I ran the catalogue record past the cardiCore before writing this post, to make sure I’d gotten the metadata itself correct. They agreed that Justine (as host) and Clare (as the sound editor) deserved added entries of their own. MARC accommodates this quite readily, simply by giving them each a 700 and a $e relator term from the exhaustive list. Naturally, newCardigan is accommodated in a 710 field.

Descriptive elements

Because nobody is actually going to read those fixed fields I just spent two hours painstakingly creating, I’m now going to fill in my 3XX and 5XX fields with all sorts of descriptive data about the podcast: how often it comes out (field 310), whether it’s streamable or downloadable (or both, in this instance), when it began (field 362), and what kind of content I can expect from the podcast (field 520).

Field 508 (Creation/Production Credits Note) enables me to credit the podcast as a newCardigan production and expand on Justine and Clare’s roles, while field 511 (Participant or Performer Note) notes that each episode has a different guest. I’ve also noted in field 588 where my descriptions have come from. This isn’t mandatory, but for a resource with no defined title page or home page it can be useful to know where the metadata came from.

The RDA content/media/carrier types are surprisingly simple: ‘spoken word’ content, ‘audio’ and ‘computer’ medium (so 2 fields) and ‘online resource’ carrier.

Subject headings

This podcast was difficult to index, chiefly because at first I wound up with too many overly-specific headings. I would have preferred an overarching $a GLAM industry $v Periodicals and $a GLAM workers $v Interviews but LCSH doesn’t have anything like that, so I had to split up the GLAM into its constituent sectors. I’m also not sure how I feel about $v Periodicals for continuing resources of this type. I think it’s the lack of print, textual content that bothers me a little. But it works, it has precedent elsewhere and I don’t have any better ideas. Perhaps in future $v Podcasts will become a form subdivision, just as it is already a genre/form term. Or we’ll abolish form subdivisions altogether. That’d be good.

In LCSH, ‘Galleries’ is a UF for ‘Art museums’, in case you were wondering.

Example record

NB: I originally wrote this in MarcEdit and painstakingly inserted all the spaces between subfields (don’t tell me, there’s a regex for that). The slash characters represent a blank space.

LDR  01880cis a2200433 i 4500
006  m\\\\\o\\h\\\\\\\\
006  ser\\\o\\\\\\\\\a2
007  cr\nua\\\auuuu
007  sr\zunnnnnzneu
008  180614c20169999vrannn\fo\\\\\\lt\\\eng\d
040  \\ $a ABCD $b eng $e RDA $d ABCD
042  \\ $a anuc
043  \\ $a u-at---
245  00 $a cardiCast : $b a GLAM podcast / $c brought to you by newCardigan.
246  3\ $a Cardi Cast
264  \1 $a Melbourne, Vic.: $b newCardigan, $c 2016-
300  \\ $a 1 online resource (audio files).
310  \\ $a Fortnightly
336  \\ $a spoken word $b spw $2 rdacontent
337  \\ $a audio $b s $2 rdamedia
337  \\ $a computer $b c $2 rdamedia
338  \\ $a online resource $b cr $2 rdacarrier
347  \\ $a audio file $b MP3 $2 rda
362  1\ $a Began in 2016.
500  \\ $a Available as streaming audio or as downloadable MP3 files.
500  \\ $a Resource website includes episode listing and links to individual downloads.
508  \\ $a Hosted by Justine Hanna ; sound editing by Clare Presser. A corporate 
           production of the newCardigan GLAM collective. 
511  \\ $a Each episode features a different speaker or interviewee.
520  \\ $a "cardiCast is a GLAM podcast published every fortnight. Hear a recording of 
           a previous cardiParty, or interviews with interesting GLAM people from 
           around Australia and the world."--newCardigan website.
588  \\ $a Description based on episode 32 and information from the newCardigan 
           website. Title from spoken introduction of episode 32 (accessed 
           June 14, 2018).
610  20 $a newCardigan $v Periodicals
650  \0 $a Art museums $v Periodicals
650  \0 $a Libraries $v Periodicals
650  \0 $a Archives $v Periodicals
650  \0 $a Museums $v Periodicals
655  \7 $a Podcasts $2 lcgft
700  1\ $a Hanna, Justine $e host
700  1\ $a Presser, Clare $e recording engineer
710  2\ $a newCardigan $e producer
856  40 $z Website with links to episodes and accompanying text 
        $u https://newcardigan.org/category/cardicast/

cardiVangelism

Have you heard the good news about cardigans?

It’s great news. And I’d like to share it with you.

You see, three years ago a small group of disaffected GLAM professionals had an idea. Instead of spending their thirties growing increasingly despondent about the future of their sector, they would bring together gallery workers, museum curators, librarians, archivists and records managers. They would hold talks and tours in cultural spaces, and invite attendees to reflect on contemporary GLAM practice and their own careers. And then they’d go for a drink.

They called the group newCardigan (presumably because we could all use one). The gatherings became cardiParties. And the word spread, from Melbourne all the way to Perth, and via the internet.

In time, someone had the brilliant idea to record gatherings for those who couldn’t attend. These became cardiCast, a wonderful way to experience cardiParties from afar and an easy hour of free PD.

They’re not just about the parties, though: newCardigan also runs the Aus GLAM Blogs twitter bot, an aggregator and reposter of the best Australian GLAM content around (including yours truly), and GLAM Blog Club, a monthly writing prompt and post roundup.

I am a devout cardigan. I am a regular cardiCast listener, an enthusiastic GLAM Blog Club blogger, a frequent contributor to Aus GLAM Blogs. I wish I could attend cardiParties every month. But I don’t live in Melbourne or Perth, and there’s not a critical mass of engaged GLAM professionals in this town to start a group of our own. So I attend vicariously, and engage in other ways, and journey every few months to Melbourne to be with my fellow cardigans. (In fact, I’m writing this post on the train home, a nine-hour odyssey.)

Interestingly, the two parties cardiCore member Nik referenced during her talk at FutureGLAM earlier that day happened to be the two parties I’ve actually been to: the Race and Identity party at the Immigration Museum in July last year, and the Unfinished Business party at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in February this year. This was in the context of newCardigan being a proudly non-neutral organisation, a naturally progressive group whose members imbue their morals and values in their work, and who aren’t afraid to address and tackle systemic inequities within our profession, and our society at large.

For my part, I don’t think I would ever have gone to either institution were it not for newCardigan. The group invites me to step far outside my comfort zone. And yet it’s a wonderfully safe and inclusive place. I have always felt at home at newCardigan. I hope others have likewise.

I recall someone telling me that while a few committed cardigans were cardiParty regulars, most attendees tended to self-silo into parties matching their sector; museum workers tended to go to parties at museums, archivists would attend archive parties and so on. I think I would have done similar at the very beginning of my career (which was only a couple of years ago!), but these days it’s nicer to branch out. One can only take so much library in one’s professional diet.


By wonderful coincidence, I was in Melbourne for newCardigan’s third birthday party. There were speeches, drinks, cake and lots of catching up, and I had a great time. Fellow cardigan Clare and I had responded to the cardiCore invitation to share our memories of the group, and seeing as we were both attending anyway it was decided we should make speeches of our own.

Clare made a beautifully prepared speech about newCardigan helping them to come out of their shell and become a more engaged librarian. I ad-libbed a highly condensed version of the above and shared an embarrassing story about my first cardiParty that had the room howling with laughter. (I won’t repeat it here. I think Hugh’s suffered enough.)

Despite not often being able to make cardiParties in person, I still get so much out of newCardigan. I try to contribute to GLAM Blog Club most months (you can read my contributions here) and I enjoy catching up on cardiCast. I’ve met so many lovely people at the parties I’ve been able to attend, and it’s been great to put twitter handles to faces. I sound like a cardiVangelist, and I suppose I am, but honestly I am just an ordinary cardigan, albeit a contented one. I can’t help the fact you’re all so awesome.

It can be hard keeping the faith sometimes as an enthusiastic new GLAM professional, in a city that often doesn’t seem to care all that much. Participating in newCardigan has helped immensely. I know I’m not alone, that others struggle the same way I do, that change will only happen if we are part of this change.

Thanks for everything cardiCore. You’re the best thing about the GLAM sector in this country.

And thank you, fellow cardigans, for being so awesome.

PS: I will shamelessly echo Clare’s parting comments: you should definitely sign up as a formal member of newCardigan. And buy a t-shirt.