I spent this morning doing some catalogue maintenance, working from home, listening to the new Bat for Lashes album, The Dream of Delphi, thinking about the next meeting of Victorian academic library cataloguers where we’ll discuss what catalogue maintenance we do in our respective workplaces, revelling in a mental lightness and freedom, and a certain distance from work troubles, that has been absent for some time. I suddenly wanted to blog about things again. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Plenty has happened since I wrote last. I went to Finland on holiday last November-December and I loved almost every second. It’s a beautiful country with friendly, stoic people and a culture that really speaks to me. I sorely wish I could move there and still do cool library stuff. The National Library of Finland does amazing linked open data work. But I also know I would really miss good avocados. And I don’t qualify for EU citizenship anywhere (trust me, I looked).
I went to ALIA National in Adelaide in May and spoke on a panel about reparative description. Less than two weeks later I grieved the sudden loss of my co-panellist Anthony McLaughlin, assistant director of cataloguing at AIATSIS. I flew interstate for his funeral with sixteen hours’ notice. I’m glad I could go.
I went to VALA in Melbourne last week and delivered a talk, ‘Infrastructures of reparative description‘. Everyone knew about the room change except me. It was very stressful. People appeared to enjoy the talk. I recorded the latest episode of cardiCast and reflected on how late-2010s Library Twitter shaped me professionally. I came to understand how so much of our lives are, in fact, a performance.
This week has been almost completely meeting-free, a rare luxury. I choose to spend some of it in my happy place, catalogue maintenance, going through a list of bibs with mismatching item types and (bib) material types, deciding that something claiming to be a book is actually a non-musical sound recording, or an item claiming to be a CD is actually a CD-ROM. It’s just complex enough that it can’t be easily automated. I also wouldn’t want to automate this. Not only do I pick up a lot of other bib errors, but the work itself is soothing, yet productive. Creating space to do this work gives me mental space to do other tasks that require more in-depth thinking. I suppose this is a kind of flow state. I miss these.