Tag: year in review

Full circle

Posted on by Alissa

decorative circle motif

Today one of my new staff members sweetly asked if this blog was in fact mine, and could they read it, so I guess blogging is over now lol. I knew a former staff member had added a link to our team wiki page before I joined, and it’s not like anything on here is secret or not-safe-for-coworkers, but it’s still a weird feeling. It’s like I’ve come full circle. No longer am I the prickly upstart new librarian shouting into the void about how nothing made sense in libraries, blogging furiously as an escape from the doom and drudgery of entry-level library work, gathering a moderate following from people glad that someone was saying the quiet parts out loud. Instead I am now a team leader, bestowing what little wisdom I have on newer and politer librarians, trying to be more considered about what I say to people (and failing miserably). I guess this is what growing up feels like?

It’s been a while between blog posts. Work has been a lot this year: navigating a restructure, farewelling staff who had worked here for decades, welcoming staff who are fresh out of library school, making sure the books get catalogued and the records get loaded, continuing our big project to implement an external knowledge base to manage our ebook collections. I had three managers this year. I’ll be getting another one next year. I love what I do but geez it’s exhausting.

I fitted in some neat stuff. Today I FINALLY rid our catalogue of the dreaded ‘Illegal aliens’ LCSH (and related headings), a full year after the changes were made official by LC. I spent a lot of time devising a neat little semi-automated workflow for in-house LCSH authorities updates, building on the work of Stacey Wolf and Mike Monaco1, only for it to fail at the final hurdle (actually loading the records), so instead I had to do things the hacky way. It’s annoying because I am very stubborn and also very cheap, and I wanted to prove that libraries shouldn’t have to outsource authorities processing if they have an older ILS like we do. I’ll give it another go next year, and perhaps write it up once the process is working.

I went on the radio and talked about cataloguing. I was a peer reviewer for Nikki Andersen’s excellent OER publication Enhancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) in Open Educational Resources (OER), Australian Edition (and Nikki cited me heavily in the section on inclusive metadata, which was a huge honour). And most exhilaratingly, I worked with the indefatigable Gemma Siemensma and others to propose a new Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) term for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, which was accepted by the US National Library of Medicine and included in the 2023 edition of MeSH, rippling out in major databases like PubMed and transforming access to health research about, and for, First Nations peoples. Honestly I am so damn proud of this. A stellar partnership between health librarians and metadata librarians to improve health informatics in a small but powerful way.

The big cheese made a big fuss about that last one. 🙂 I’ll never get over working somewhere that values and amplifies me.

I continued my work on the ACORD committee, including getting our new website off the ground and joining a nascent (exciting!!!) cross-sector project to develop best practice guidelines for First Nations collection description. I finally joined the newCardigan committee after they ran out of treasurers. I briefly picked up some work as an external marker for Charles Sturt University, but unfortunately I had to cut my contract short. Turns out I can’t quite do everything.

I’m glad I avoided having to move house and reapply for my own job in the same week, again. Been there, done that, horrible. My position was translated to the new structure, meaning that the bulk of my role stayed the same and I was spared the reapplication process. I have a great new job title, more staff, but also more team responsibilities. I can’t wait to automate more of the boring stuff. And not move house again for a long while.

Also—breaking news—I read a book! I finished reading a book!!!!!! I finished reading several books. I hadn’t finished a book in years. All the fun and joy of reading had left me for so long, and yet I kept buying books in the hope I would one day be well enough to read them. I think my favourite book was Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty, an exhilarating book by a gifted young Autistic writer.

I did a lot of therapy. I became a big fan of sauerkraut and other fermented foods (every so often my repressed Polish ancestry comes to the surface). I successfully avoided getting covid, as far as I’m aware. Being a hermit has never been so fashionable.

I am so ready for a break. Next year at work is gonna be even huger than this year. I think my new team is up for it though, and I’m not just saying that because I know at least one of my staff will read this. I genuinely think we’ve got a great bunch of people together, and whatever comes up next year, we’ll make it work.

Man, now I really do sound like a manager.

  1. Wolf, S. (2020). Automating Authority Control Processes. The Code4Lib Journal, 47;
    Monaco, M. (2020). Methods for In-Sourcing Authority Control with MarcEdit, SQL, and Regular Expressions. Journal of Library Metadata, 20(1), 1–27. ↩

Making up for lost time

Posted on by Alissa

The time between Christmas and New Year’s traditionally goes a bit wonky. Routines and schedules are discarded, it’s totally fine to wear your pyjamas all day, people start to forget what day it is. Hang on, is it not March 2020 any more?

Everyone seems pretty miserable at the end of this year. Covid prevalence is high and consumer confidence is low. Governments the world over have largely stopped prioritising the people’s welfare above the drivers of capitalist greed. We were always already on our own, but now it’s official. Staying apart didn’t much keep us together, did it? I have a lot of experience being miserable (and worse), so you’d think I’d be helping myself to an extra serve of gloom.

Except… I am happy instead. It’s been a large year, and a dream come true.

In June I uprooted my entire life and moved to regional Victoria, taking on the role of metadata team leader within an academic library. I went up two or three pay grades in one hit (depending on how you count them) and had to very quickly learn how to manage a team, remotely, during assorted lockdowns, doing work that ideally would have been automated several years ago. I’m not a natural manager, and this was very hard work. I was technically ‘of no fixed address’ for several weeks, living in a student residence with overactive smoke alarms, before moving into a delightful little cottage that I’m slowly filling with houseplants.

My six-month stint as a systems librarian has turned out to be incredibly useful in my current metadata role. To an extent systems work and metadata work are two sides of the same coin; systems shape how (meta)data is recorded, but metadata shapes how systems are used. Interestingly, a lot of the work done by the metadata team here was done by the systems team (ie. by me) at my old job (batch MARC uploads, Serials Solutions updates, global updates etc). I think this is partly because Sierra has much more robust capabilities in this area than Voyager, and partly because my team are trusted (and paid) to not break the database.

I inherited quite a lot of ‘this is how we do things, they’re different to how everyone else does things, we’re special’ processes. I don’t doubt these workflows were genuinely innovative about fifteen years ago. My section’s ingrained philosophies of data quality are really quite fascinating. I just don’t agree with them, or feel that these manual workarounds are necessary. Delightfully, my fellow team leader agrees, and the two of us have been working on a large project to overhaul our metadata sources and structures. It turns out she and I have highly complementary skillsets: I write the talks and she does the talking. We’ve been getting rave reviews from our director and the University Librarian. I can’t tell you what an incredible thrill it is to get that kind of positive feedback and institutional support from senior management. I want everyone to experience this.

My position had been vacant for eighteen months before I joined, thanks to an ill-timed departure, a subsequent pandemic hiring freeze and multiple attempts at recruitment. The team had been largely running on autopilot, and I think some of the wider library had forgotten what a metadata team leader is, or should be. It’s been interesting getting a sense of what other people think my job is. I look forward to re-envisioning metadata work, implementing some long-overdue structural change before taking a closer look at how we can radically improve our corpus, while working closely with other areas to make our data work for them.

Because my paid library work now takes up 120% of my brain, my unpaid library work has taken a backseat. I only wrote a handful of blog posts, as GLAM Blog Club wound up due to lack of interest, and my attention was very much elsewhere. I think the biggest-impact post was probably ‘Libraries are for everyone! Except if you’re autistic’, which I wrote in February after a run-in with some awful library directors (one of whom I used to work for). If they think managing neurodiverse library workers is hard, they should try being one! Being an autistic team leader is even harder! I came across the anonymous blog Managing Whilst Autistic on my travels, which I’m hoping will uncover more advice on how to harness my strengths.

I also didn’t do any talks this year! Woohoo! Unless you count the impromptu talk to the entire library about ditching Dewey, oops. I think the bolded line on my About page stating ‘Please don’t ask me to do talks’ might have had something to do with it. It was great not being stressed about upcoming public speaking. Written pieces are more my thing. I also finished up on the VALA Committee after two years of contributing practically nothing (in my defence, I was very unwell for almost all of that time) and continued as Information Officer for ACORD, the ALIA Community on Resource Description.

I continued my streak of not finishing a single book this year (whatever! I’ve been busy) but I did start several excellent books, including The Flip by Jeffrey J. Kripal (seriously, read this book) and Anchored by Deb Dana. I also positively inhaled the ABC series Back to Nature, ostensibly about the great Australian outdoors, but really about the deep and continuing history of this continent, guided by First Nations land-carers.

So many of us have experienced close personal loss this year. I keep forgetting that this technically includes me: my estranged father died suddenly at the end of July, aged fifty-nine, apparently from a heart attack. I felt many complex things upon learning of his death, but sadness was not one of them. I felt angry, happy, resentful, bitter. Mostly I felt deeply liberated. I’m glad he’s dead. People don’t really know how to respond to that.

This year has been a lot but it’s also been the happiest year of my life. I am doing so much better here, closer to friends, in a healthier and more secure environment, with a more helpful therapist, hundreds of kilometres away from everything that sought to destroy me. I am acutely aware that most people have not been nearly as fortunate as I have. I feel like it’s becoming almost impolite to talk about how well I am now, in the face of so much misery and suffering and institutional indifference. Hundreds of people at MPOW lost their jobs this year. Everyone in Victoria has spent months in lockdown. We are all traumatised. We are all over it.

And yet… I have learned to focus on what I can control. I can enjoy my job, and my houseplants, and the sunshine. I can be a hermit in paradise. I can actively choose not to mask my autistic traits (it turns out). I don’t have to contort myself into something I think other people will like and fail miserably. I don’t have to read the news every day (it’s always the same news, but it’s also the wrong news, distracting us from the real crises).

My goals for the last few years have been along the lines of ‘try not to die’ and ‘go outside more’. I’m comfortable ticking those things off my list now, but I’m not yet sure what my new goals will be. Perhaps maintaining what I already have can be a goal in itself. It’s okay to make up for lost time.

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:

Doing less while doing better

Posted on by Alissa

Peppermint tea on a train window-sill

Last year I met Hugh’s dad at a party. He initially mistook me for someone else but was polite enough to keep chatting to our table. I forget exactly how I was introduced—possibly as some kind of erstwhile twitter personality—but he ultimately told me, kindly but firmly, to ‘stop being so self-deprecating!’.

Not wishing to disappoint Papa Rundle, I had initially planned to write a triumphant overview of everything I achieved in 2019. I ended up with quite a long list. And yet I found myself at the end of the decade in much the same place I’d started it: having anxiety attacks and failing at parties. Things got worse. Things got better. Things got worse.

I worked myself to pieces last year and all I felt was failure. Haven’t we been here before?

At the start of the year, I had a lot to look forward to. After a tumultuous 2018 I took a month off work and fled to Tasmania. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I went to Mona Foma festival in Launceston, felt the warm embrace of nature at Cradle Mountain, admired the blowhole at Bicheno, explored the museums and pad thai establishments of Hobart. I became a #feralcataloguer. I drank my weight in Jive Honey Crunch, the best flavoured milk you’ve never had. I loved the island of lutruwita. I’d go back in an instant.

For the first time in my library career, I spent an entire calendar year working for the same organisation (a small, minor national library that shall remain nameless). Years of hope labour paid off when I was made permanent there in July, with the grandiose job title of ‘Metadata Coordinator’. Three weeks later I gained a temporary promotion to the web archiving team, where I’ve stayed ever since. Web archiving is a fascinating little area of GLAM work and I’ve really enjoyed my time in the team. I particularly enjoyed playing ScoMo Simulator on company time (and thanks to the Australian Web Archive, you can play it too).

I did, as usual, an absolutely ridiculous amount of PD. I ran a three-hour OpenRefine workshop at VALA Tech Camp and was on the committee for Tech Camp and generally helped make Tech Camp happen. Hugh and I both learned that running both a conference and a workshop at that conference is extremely stressful and that we really shouldn’t do that again. I promptly forgot this lesson in overscheduling and presented two full talks at the 9th New Librarians’ Symposium (NLS9), telling a packed room ‘We need to talk about cataloguing’. It was the conference talk I’d always wanted to give, and it was a great success. I backed it up ninety minutes later with a talk about zines with Kassi.

I was elected to VALA Committee. I was appointed to ACORD Committee. I went to GLAMSLAM. I went to the ADA copyright forum. I joined an international working group on cataloguing ethics. I co-ran ACTive ALIA (not that we did much). I contributed to the third Auslib zine. A mystery someone called me their library hero (!) and got ALIA to write nice things about me in inCite.

I wrote 16 blog posts, including 7 for GLAM Blog Club. My favourite post was ‘The people’s cataloguer’, a wonderfully serendipitous (and extremely Tasmanian) tale of cataloguing 110 books that comprised The People’s Library, and in so doing becoming part of that library’s performance.

I attended five cardiparties, which I think is quite impressive considering I don’t live in any of the places they were held in. I saw the sights of Ballarat on foot in January, marvelled at the incredible Incendium Radical Library in Footscray in February, heard from Liz Stokes at the GLAMSLAM sideshow in Sydney in March, toured the Incinerator Gallery in Moonee Ponds in April, and was all along the water tower in Sale in November.

I read some incredible things in the past year. I read that information doesn’t grow on trees, that information maintenance is a practice of care, about efforts to build an antifascist AI and an anarchist HCI, and that doing the impossible is the most rational thing we can do. I also started reading the absolutely magnificent Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. You should read it too.

I catalogued a lot of books. I archived a lot of websites. I drank a lot of tea. I spent a lot of time on long-distance trains. Oh, and I shaved my head. Repeatedly. It was awesome.

I had some pretty crap life stuff happen too, though. I lost two extended family members: my cousin Tristan was killed in a motorcycle accident in June, and my favourite uncle Vince died suddenly in early January this year. On both occasions I was out of town and away from immediate family. The distance hurt more than I expected.

I also spent several months being various kinds of not-well, and not just because of the smoke haze choking the city. I set myself a lot of lessons. I didn’t learn any of them.

By any reasonable standard, I had a huge and fairly successful year. And yet so much of me is hyper-focused on all the things I failed at. I totally blanked on the cataloguing ethics group. People asked me to write for their blogs, invited me to contribute to their projects, emailed me looking for cataloguing advice etc and I just never got back to them. I couldn’t face my inbox. I couldn’t face next week. I was completely overwhelmed by everything and I dropped a lot of balls. Most of those balls were made of plastic, but a few were made of glass.

After many years part of me has finally realised that no matter how much I throw myself into library work, it will never fix the gaping holes in the rest of my life. I might have loved libraries, but libraries were never gonna love me back. I spent most of this past January considering whether I still wanted to be a librarian at all. It’s hard not to look at the state of the earth and wonder whether librarianship is really the best use of my time and talents. Honestly, I’m not sure it is any more. All other things being equal, sure, I’d love to sit around and tinker with metadata until I retire. But I don’t live in that world and there’s no point pretending I do.

I cannot keep working at the rate I have been because otherwise I will completely disintegrate. Nor do I want to keep doing so much library stuff at the expense of literally everything else. The environment doesn’t care what I put in a library catalogue. Something needs to change.

This year I have… well, I was going to say one goal. I have many goals and most of them are not for public consumption. But my biggest and most public goal is to do less, while doing better.

In 2019 I hoped to ‘to learn more about how my upbringing has shaped my inbuilt theories of knowledge’ and ‘learn more about nature from nature itself’. I tried to spend more time in nature, even as our climate is rapidly changing and the seasons are collapsing around us. I became a lot more aware of what, and how, different groups of people learn about the natural world. I had a lot of complex thoughts on this and neglected to properly write them down, so I want to come back to this in another post.

Ultimately I want to spend more time sipping peppermint tea on a train, learning this landscape and helping to heal it. I want to do less. I want to do better. I want to get better. And maybe then I’ll be a little less self-deprecating.

The means to an end

Posted on by Alissa

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.

Back yourself (or, Five things I accomplished in 2017)

Posted on by Alissa

In the absence of any collaborative material to write about for GLAM Blog Club (sorry), my thoughts turned to a year in review post. My 2017 was, like many people’s (and the planet’s), a year of extremes. Lots of really good things happened to me. Lots of really awful things happened to me. I can only hope I learned from the bad and made the most of the good. I learned a lot this year, but most of those lessons essentially boiled down to one thing: Back yourself.

This doesn’t mean ‘I’m always right’ or ‘I am untouchable’. I spent a lot of this year questioning my judgment, which admittedly in parts was fairly terrible. It’s more along the lines of ‘Think things through, come to a position on something and own it, and if you change your mind, own that too’. It also means ‘Know your own worth—don’t listen to those who don’t value you’.

I’m finishing the year in a very different position from when I started it. It’s slightly mind-boggling just how much I accomplished in 2017. Below is a brief overview:

  • New job! I quit my (permanent) job as a local history librarian and took up a new (temporary) gig as a tech services officer in a law library. Wait, what?! Most new grads would give their right arms for a permanent gig, and here I am giving mine away!? It sounds crazy on paper, especially because I know very little about law, but I’m confident it was the right decision for me. Time will tell whether I can parlay that into other opportunities.
  • So much networking! For an introvert with no social skills and an intermittent anxiety disorder, I sure went to a lot of stuff this year. I attended NLS8, VALA Tech Camp, the NSLA digipres forum, local ALIA SNGG events, a newCardigan meetup and much more. I met loads of people (many of whom, disconcertingly enough, already knew who I was!). I tweeted my little heart out. I have over 700 followers! How the heck did that happen?
  • Lots of writing! I wrote 18 blog posts in 2017, including eight for GLAM Blog Club, an excellent initiative from newCardigan. My two favourite blog posts this year were ‘Cò mise? = Who am I?’ and ‘How to catalogue a beer can’. I also wrote two pieces for professional journals, both of which are slated for publication in the new year. (Don’t worry, I’ll be telling everybody when they’re out!)
  • Almost a degree! I finally finished all the coursework for my MIS, but couldn’t quite make the professional placement happen. If anyone wants me in their library or GLAM institution for free for three weeks, or alternatively knows someone in Scotland who wants some free labour from a neach-ionnsachaidh na Gàidhlig, hit me up 🙂
  • Speaking up! In September, I wrote an open letter to the ALIA Board of Directors regarding their public position on marriage equality, after sustained lobbying from NGAC and others. I’m not much of a public letter-writer and I usually keep my political opinions off the internet, but this time I decided to speak up for a cause that mattered to me. It was my first real experience of advocacy within LIS. I’d like to think it made a bit of a difference.

If nothing else, 2017 has been a year of intense personal growth. Professionally and personally, I’m determined to start 2018 in a better place.

I’m determined to back myself.