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I am struggling to put words to last year. I would like to try and write a more substantial professional reflection at some point, but to be honest at the end of my first week back the overwhelming feeling is one of continuation. I gave myself two mini-goals this week to help ease back into things though, read one article each day and put it into some kind of round-up post to resurrect my blog. I have dreaded even logging back in but here I am and here is a post. I’ll punctuate with some pictures from my (almost) daily walks that I am still trying to fit in even though Summer is really testing my resolve on that front.

A garden I walk past in my neighbourhood with a number of beautiful flowering plants and shrubs, with the distinct cone shaped pale pink echinacea blossoms in the middle of the shot. The grass is green and lush to the right of the shot, and the mailbox is visible in the top left of the shot.
Admiring some neighbourhood echinacea.

Accepting the hard stuff by Graham Panther

I am a huge fan of the Big Feels Club, and of the peer support model for mental health at large. I started going to therapy regularly again last year, actually for the first time in my life before things got to a crisis point, rather than the point where everything has fallen apart and I am a few sleepless nights from needing to be in hospital. But last year I felt the threat of being dragged under and managed to make an appointment before I was crushed in the undertow, which feels like a huge achievement all on its own. I really think reflections such as this one from Graham really helped me get to that place. Therapy for me has always been an important process of externalization – emptying my head to an impartial party who will every now and then offer some insight. There are so many things that are potentially there for the big feeler in a therapy setting, and it also has a hell of a lot of shortcomings. I can’t recommend the podcast No Feeling Is Final by Graham and his partner Honor Eastly if you would like some insight into what a mental health breakdown and recovery(ish) can look like in the Australian healthcare system, and why in general ‘just asking for help’ isn’t actually that useful for a lot of us. This is something really huge that I would love to talk about more, especially with my specific connections made to working in the library world and being depressed and anxious and often interacting with extremely stressed and anxious people, but I’ll give that topic some of its own posts when I have more time to dedicate to it.

A shot of the Maroubra headland taken from Malabar Head at sunset. There is some bush visible in the bottom of the photo, the ocean takes up the middle of the shot, there is a strip of the coast with the evening lights starting to come on in the foreground, and then the rest of the shot is made up of the pale dusk sky.
The view from Malabar Head of Maroubra.

In the Catalogue by Vanessa Berry

“With every object I inspected I came up against a point of restraint of some kind. It had happened when I opened the envelope to see the hair net folded delicately around the tissue paper, and when I touched the sample of corduroy, experiencing in my gesture an echo of how others would have done the same. In such moments I become aware of the collapse and expanse of time”.

Embodiment and archivy are a particularly juicy match and Vanessa Berry always gives live to forgotten corners of our world. I’m a huge fan of Vanessa’s work so it has been thrilling to see her work on the Dictionary of Sydney partnering up with the State Library of New South Wales. GLAMR and Zine worlds colliding, as if they have ever been able to be fully separate anyway. I was especially creeped out by the hairnet that sparks the start of this article boasting ‘Made from Human Hair’, but it is entirely false to think of any object in an archive as being able to be severed from its all-too-human origins.

The grassy front yard of an apartment building with crested pigeons and rainbow lorikeets eating together next to a water bowl that has been set out for them.
Snack time with friends.

Plan S launches, but will it drive down publisher fees? By Jack Grove

Not only is Open Access anything always big news in library world, Plan S has definitely been something a lot of people are hanging their hats on in Australia. To be honest I haven’t been able to entirely understand why. This latest update seems to indicate that Article Processing Fees are not going to be reducing in a meaningful way despite pressure and transparency revealing that the biggest journals are going to continue to butt up against the attempts to change the funding models attached to them. I do appreciate that this article highlights that as usual, researching under capitalism will always hold making money much higher over making knowledge accessible. Or as University Librarian for Brigham Young is quoted in the article – “As long as it’s more desirable to publish in some journals than in others, competitive pressures will drive prices up for the desired ones”.

A wattle tree in bloom, covered in bright yellow flowers.
Always looking out for wattle.

Your Life’s Work by Eda Günaydın

You might think I have chosen a pretty wild mix of stuff here, but that’s what happens when you open a browser after being on break for 3 weeks and start to try and clear out some of the tabs in earnest. I think this piece captures not only something really distinctive about the nature of work (maybe especially as a millennial, but definitely as someone supposedly working their dream job who is often caught telling people about how much it still sucks)  but also weirdly prophetically about the particular drudgery that work has been under COVID. Take this passage for instance: 

“In these mediated realities, everything is both real and fake. Or, more accurately, these categories collapse and become moot because they are subordinated to a more important classification: everything is work, regardless of its real or fake status. We no longer have a ‘work voice’ and ‘work outfit’ and a real, authentic self. Our authentic selves have become what is on offer, which means that we work nonstop”.

One of the most difficult things for me personally about last year, and about how I thought I would magically feel differently in the new year despite many things still being the same or worse, is that my work self and my not work self kind of collapsed. I know I’m in the shit when I wake up before my alarm, and lie in bed composing emails I know I need to get up and send, which used to only happen when I was facing particularly busy weeks at the library. This tends to happen a few times a week during work from home, compounded by my pandemic anxiety making it both more difficult to fall asleep and night and impossible to get back to sleep if I do wake up during the night or early morning. Maybe some people would question the necessity of the existence of ‘an authentic self’ but to them I would try and describe just how bleak it has felt to have those selves collapse as I barely left my house and my work space was about 10 steps away from my bed since March 2020. And I don’t really think that feeling is resolved by being forced back into the office when there is still community transmission (as what is potentially happening next week at my place of work), but ironically voicing deep anxieties and fears like that are pretty taboo at work, even while my most authentic self is being demanded provide support to students and staff.

I didn’t quite make it to one article a day, but damn I got close! I often insist that Librarians do not have the luxury of being able to sit around and read all day, and maybe I am undoing some of that by choosing to share what I have read on and off the clock this week. I think I am trying to make the point that, at most, even in this ‘quiet period’ of the year, I get the chance to read about 1 article a day. Even when I am making a concerted effort to keep on top of my professional development, I am finding that the business-as-usual work still finds me and interrupts me. Especially with the pandemic damaging my already fragile attention span. I think it would help me immensely to find some time to reflect and write about the bigger things from the last year or so, like online events that would otherwise be accessible, supporting lonely students, accessibility and online content creation, being okay with progressing professionally without actually always trying to change jobs, but to also try and cultivate a smaller and more frequent practice of reflecting and sharing. Even if it’s just sharing a few articles when I haven’t been able to make time to find the words for anything else.

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This is a fun topic for me to jump in on because this whole blog is kind of a secret at the moment. I’ve been slowly setting it up, learning my way around WordPress, trying out a few different kinds of posts, plugging in the Google Analytics to see if anyone is actually reading and then instantly feeling guilty about the privacy implications around using them… I have been thinking a lot about the boundaries in my life between putting myself out there in a professional way and my fear that the exposure will somehow lead to my downfall. Call it impostor syndrome or paranoia – it doesn’t make it any easier to take the plunge. 

An image of a sandy beach with some scrub land on the left and the ocean on the right. The author is using it for decoration and also to be a bit literal with the idea of 'taking the plunge' - like you would into the water at the beach.
Culdaff Beach in Ireland where I did take the plunge earlier this year despite the 4 degree water temperature.

Maybe I could make this about the impostor syndrome that I hide in my core – that makes it sound kind of dark and kind of intense but I don’t know how else to put it. I very rarely know exactly what I’m doing – I spend a lot of time figuring out stuff and making mistakes. After 5 years as a librarian I still feel like I tricked my way into my job and they will find out any day and send me home. I may be qualified in the ALIA sense, but so little of my degree was library specific, something that is really standing out to me now that I am back studying in the School of Information at Charles Sturt. I may be doing a Masters and doing the Archiving and Record Keeping stream but the subjects I am doing at the moment are very information generalist subjects that… echo some of what I was originally taught but are almost hilariously more conservative and library specific. I keep on having these moments while I am doing the readings – ‘oh, so that is why people do things that way here’ which is totally wild. You would think I would know, looking at my job title and experience. 

I am really interested in what it means to keep showing up, to keep trying, and to finally be able to own some of my experience and expertise in the moments when it does all feel right and make sense. The secret to combating the overwhelming experience of impostor syndrome is being able to hold on to these moments. I presented my first presentation at a conference at the beginning of this month. It was one of those events that I was graciously volunteered for by my managers and although it was on a topic and with content that I have presented in workshops to higher degree researchers and academics before – something about it being in a conference program with an audience that I wouldn’t know much about until I was in the lecture theatre really terrified me. It was going to be a presentation on publication strategies in the librarian stream of ResBaz Sydney. I spent a lot of time in the lead up feeling pretty terrible, I wasn’t on until 4pm and the whole day before I was extremely tense. But then I got up to present and it… actually went okay. I didn’t fall on my face, the technology mostly worked, I spoke for the amount of time I was meant to, and people asked questions! Meaningful ones that I answered on the spot and felt good about. A colleague posted an action shot to our library’s Twitter:

The blurred hands of a passionate session outline

And another one sent me an email the following day congratulating me on how well I had done. Take that impostor syndrome, no one threw fruit or booed! I seemed as legit as anyone else presenting that week! Aha! Maybe I do know some things, maybe I did get the job for more than my Rumpelstiltskin like trickery. It genuinely made me feel like maybe I could do a conference presentation again, with material that I had written all myself on a topic of my choosing. So hopefully writing this up will help make that feeling last, and make me less stymied by my secret doubts and shames and put myself out there in more ways and own that I may actually be a competent professional. At least some of the time.

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To be truthful I have not read an awful lot this week, so some of these are bites from the last month or so, but all are things that have struck me or stuck with me and that I think are worth sharing. 

“Will it be enough? I don’t know. What I do know is that doing something—doing anything—is better than doing nothing. That action is the best antidote to despair. And that in the end we have no choice but to try. For as Greta Thunberg has observed, ‘Change is coming, whether you like it or not.’ Whether that is a threat, a promise or both is up to us”. 

Unearthed by James Bradley

I might be spoiling this piece by posting it’s last paragraph but Woof! If you read anything about the climate crisis and the Skolstrejk I want it to be these damning but hopeful 68 words. The Strike was of course massive, and I definitely felt the absence of staff and students on campus even though I was not able to strike myself.

A hard pivot away from climate catastrophe, but here we go. Even though I haven’t been reading as much as I like to, I have been listening to podcasts as much as usual (if not more). A friend turned me on to You’re Wrong About which I will definitely find an excuse to talk about again in more detail, but I mention it now to bring attention to the work of co-host Sarah Marshall’s sprawling wondrous piece on the making of Titanic and the ensuing cultural phenomena surrounding the film and Leonardo DiCaprio.

“When the unafflicted tried to make sense of the phenomenon following the movie’s release, they tended to focus on Leo’s looks and his celebrity, and of course they weren’t wrong. Like all adolescent crushes, he was perfect and remote: He couldn’t hurt you, couldn’t reject you, couldn’t disappoint you. And as Jack Dawson, he was pure fantasy: so handsome as to seem almost unearthly; an androgynous angel who wanted only to love you, to worship you, and to be the idea of a romantic partner, one with whom reality could never try to compete”. 

The Incredible True Story Of How “Titanic” Got Made by Sarah Marshall

I wanted to share this one because I am embarrassed that the core premise of this article is not something that had occurred to me. How inclusive is coding if it relies on English? There are many other interesting points about the promises and the realities of the Internet that we work with today – important reflection now that we’ve had the World Wide Web for 30 years.

“But many newer languages, like Python, Ruby, and Lua, come from non-English speaking countries (the Netherlands, Japan, and Brazil) and still use English-based keywords. The initial promise of the web is, for many people, more of a threat—speak English or get left out of the network”.

Coding Is for Everyone—as Long as You Speak English by Gretchen McCulloch
Emoji mash up of the Angry and Partying emojis to make a sullen party goer

Lastly – the best single serve Twitter that I have seen in awhile: Emoji Mashup Bot. The angry party emoji is me thinking about emails I need to answer while I am trying to enjoy myself after work.

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I’ve been saying sorry a lot this week. It’s the first week of teaching of term 3, and I’m feeling stretched to my limit. Just when one email gets answered about showing a film in class tomorrow, another one comes in from someone who has only just started putting their course resources together and needs help with the software Right This Minute. The students are waiting! Assignments rely on the content! Project work that I have barely kept up with over August is still happening, still asking things of me that I have not finished (and in some cases not started). And I have a welcome presentation that I need to get slides done for. And through all this is the sorry – trying to communicate my busy-ness and just holding on without coming across as pitying. But I am overwhelmed! And I do want people’s empathy! And patience! 

This is all to say that I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t, and give myself the space to stop saying sorry and feel like I am enough. At least for the length of a blog post if not for the rest of the day. 

*checks email one more time to make sure nothing new has caught on fire* 

What has worked?

I have left on time every day this week. Last week I worked 9 hours every day and then called in sick on Friday because I just couldn’t. I knew that if I did that again this week I would cry on the way to work every day. So I have left no later than my due 7 or 8 hours. And not checked any email outside of work time – there is only so much I can do away from my desk and occupying more of my free time with anxiety is not helping. 

I booked leave for the coming weeks. I knew I would need to use up all this time in lieu I had been building up, but that it wouldn’t happen unless I scheduled it. So I booked in that time and some bonus annual leave days for some shorter weeks coming up that don’t rely on me calling in sick from exhaustion. 

I walked for at least 20 minutes every day. One day it was a long lunch. Yesterday I got off the train 1 stop early and walked home. The sun has just come out so today I think it’s another lunchtime walk. There’s nothing worse than being tired and drained but not being able to sleep when you actually get into bed – and for me that means I need some movement in my day but I have to fight for that time. I have to put it in my calendar and not think of it as optional or movable. 

What hasn’t worked?

I’ve been eating pretty poorly. Food will always be really hard for me. I know this is meant to be a professional space that I am cultivating but I don’t really know the point of that unless you can also let people be people. So I have food issues and stress brings them painfully to the fore. Today I am trying to get back on track by not focusing on it too much, and making a lot of better options for me available at hand. We’ll see how I go. 

Sleep. It’s so hard to know how much I actually need when 8 hours never feels like enough. But then I think about it a bit more and really the 8 hours was whittled down pretty significantly by laying in bed composing emails in my head I didn’t have time to send, the cat waking me up at 2 and then at 4, and then waking up before my alarm. Now that there is more light as we head into Spring properly, I think I need to wake up earlier as earlier routines have helped with getting a more solid sleep in. 

This last one is the weirdest one to write and share yet, but I have been thinking about it a lot and it will be something to keep working on as I don’t have a good answer to what to do about it. I was so overwhelmed on Monday that I cried (quite a lot) in front of my direct manager at the end of our regular catch up meeting. It was one of those cries that I just could not stop once it started – all the more because this manager was being nice to me and trying her hardest to comfort me. I was just at the end of my rope for the day and tired of pretending that I was okay and on top of things. I don’t know how to be truthful about this to any of the managers here. That our workloads are just so huge and sometimes that sucks in a way that you can’t fix with a to-do list. No amount of prioritising work helps when you have regular stuff pop up out of the blue that can and will derail what you could be working on at any time. Or when we are meant to be constantly developing ourselves in our profession, staying current and cutting edge, learning new skills, and also answering our phone whenever it rings. So this is a big WIP for me – knowing how to communicate that treading water is tiring and not getting so bogged down in how much there is to do that I can’t focus on any one thing to get done. 

Hazy sunset before the rain set in

I set myself a timer to write this – and it’s almost up. It does help to get things down, and I hope I won’t regret the overshare. But it’s so painful not to share. I want a space to grow and reflect and share but I know I will have to crowbar it in to my life to really get it working. There will be time and space for more reflection, and more writing in general, if I make time and space for posts like this. Done is better than perfect. 

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A small assembly of works that have stuck with me, moved me, or maybe even riled me up – in the vein of Waypoints but more one sided.

This week is NAIDOC Week – a week to celebrate the culture of Aboriginal Australians while not ignoring its activist origins in the 1938 Day of Mourning. The theme for this year is Voice. Treaty. Truth. And I have been endeavoring to surround myself with the voices of Aboriginal people – and a great place to start is the NITV NAIDOC coverage. I particularly enjoyed Hidden women of history: Isabel Flick, the tenacious campaigner who fought segregation in Australia by Heather Goodall and not just because Isabel reminds me of my own nan. 

Born in 1928, Isabel had shown how tenacious she was from a young age – although denied access to the Collarenebri public school, she was determined to teach herself to read and write. And she did. On the veranda of the local manse as a child and then in every place she worked and lived, Isabel grabbed every shred of knowledge and skill she could, determined she would not be defeated by segregation and exclusion. 

What a firecracker – with so much more in the full article

There are so many amazing women out there that don’t show up in the spotlight of curriculum or history books, and I am so glad that Heather Goodall helped Isabel record her life story and turn it into a book. I also wanted to mention the UNSW on campus light exhibition – NAIDOC After Dark which I wandered around last night while listening to the accompanying playlist.

View from mid-campus down to Anzac Parade with the NAIDOC After Dark lights on

I listen to at least 2 hours of podcasts each day (on my commute and lunchtime walk and this week I wanted to share Nuku Women – Nuku #15 Kim Tairi. Sometimes I am even lucky enough to have a small amount of work that can be done while listening to podcasts, and I have been discovering more and more Library podcasts that make me feel less guilty for listening during on library $$$. The Nuku Women project is by Qiane Matata-Sipu and is phenomenal, and I am sorry that I hadn’t heard of it until I found library twitter talking about the episode with Auckland University of Technology University Librarian Kim Tairi. I have added Nuku to my podcast feed now and am diving deeper into the project outside of Library hours. I wanted to highlight Kim’s interview as it tackles some of the stereotypes I have already mentioned taking ire with, as well as getting into some deep and juicy reflections on what makes libraries worthwhile. I was cheering while listening to Kim dig into how we need to break down the barriers that keep people out of libraries – ‘Libraries belong to the community’.

We’re publicly funded – so this is your place. I work here, but this is your place.

Say it again for those in the back Kim!

Something else that shone out to me was the importance of listening to people whose material is in our collections – with the knowledge we have in our institutions. With the push to digitisation time and consideration need to be built into the process, rather than just racing ahead to make it available digitally and chucking out the physical. We’re not at a place where this goes without saying, and I don’t think it’s useful to think we will ever be ‘good enough’ to not emphasise the care that is required in handling knowledge. As Kim says – ‘It can take a long time – but isn’t it worth doing properly?’

I had to include one of Qiane’s photos, Kim is known in the library world for more than her wise words! #LibrarianStyle

My next bite is Giving Amazon’s Side of the Story – I’m including this one purely so that I can out myself as a union member and activist as early as possible in this blog. Rarely can I read anything about Amazon without feeling equal parts rage and sadness. It was so refreshing to read this Jacobin piece by Marc Kagan and feel like I was finally being met on my level by a journalist. I’ve seen plenty of pieces about the abject misery of working in Amazon warehouses (or as an Amazon delivery driver) but very little that goes past the human interest aspect of oppressed and mistreated workers to the source of that misery and torment – managers, CEOs, company owners etc. People in charge whose profit line depends on our backs as capitalism relies on the grind of the proletariat for its never ending growth. Read the piece and join your union and I will endeavor to write more about this in the future.

Lastly Tiny Private Mind-Motions gives a joyfully specific phrase to refer to a weird thing that my (and apparently everyone else’s) brain does. The one I will share from my brain this week is that while I was trying to be careful while eating breakfast on the train to work my brain was inexplicably reinforcing this by saying ‘here comes the aeroplane’ like I am a little baby. Gosh I’m glad it’s the weekend.

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Well I’ve got to start somewhere. This is much more awkward than I was anticipating.

I cribbed the title of this blog from the Leslie Jamison book The Empathy Exams: Essays, but more specifically from this quote:

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

Sorry to get literal but I imagine I will be using my #skydiary to illustrate this blog quite often

I’m a library professional who really quibbles with the stereotype/popular culture caricature of the Librarian who is a dowdy middle-aged woman who reads all day behind a big oak desk, shushing all noise from the patrons who she has open disdain for. I think that information work is empathy work – that every day in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) we not only acknowledge the extending horizon of the context of our collections, but we work to connect people to that extending horizon, and actively encourage the building work required in shaping that horizon. Yes Library work is people work, and  yes we still need librarians and all kinds of information professionals to help us find things that Google can’t.

I’ve had my qualification to be a capital ‘L’ Librarian for 5 years now, and I have craved a semi-formal writing practice and space for awhile now. I work as a liason-type librarian in an academic tertiary institution and so much of this job is about staying on top of various trends – information, publishing, metics, funding, and we don’t always have our own personal spaces for reflection. I also read professional blogs by other GLAM folks when I get a spare 15 minutes at work and I have found them to be equal parts informative and comforting, and I want to see what happens if I add my voice to the ring. I think of myself as having something to say – I have been creating content online most of my life at this point. But it’s going to be a fun pivot to try and change the haphazard and largely unplanned way I put things out into the World Wide Web into something that is worth sharing with people, or at the very least looking back on myself. I mean that is the end goal – to be able to point people I meet in my library life to something that I have set up that isn’t just my contact details on an institutional webpage. And to have other people reading this – to feel a part of the online community of all kinds of information and cultural workers. I’m also about to begin a Masters after being out of the study game for as long as I’ve been working and I need all the writing experience I can get. I don’t have much more to say just yet as a personal intro – mostly because I’m still trying to gauge how out there I am going to be, but I think a good place to start would be to show some love to the blogs I read myself.

Three blogs I read on the job in those rare 15 minutes between meetings and talking to Library users (and some recommended posts from each):  

If you read and Library or adjacent blogs already, you are probably reading Lissertations/Alissa’s blog. I have been a quiet admirer for a long time though so I couldn’t not include a link in this mini blog round-up. I opened this post up with some of my frustrations with the way librarianship is perceived – and Alissa’s blog runs on a similar theme but with one of the most misunderstood and maligned parts of librarianship: cataloguing. This is the topic in libraries that a lot of librarians are guilty of misunderstanding – often to their own (and their patrons or users!) detriment. But understanding not just how are information systems currently work, but also their (often pretty shady) history is so important to this job. I am already going to break my own rules and link to two posts from Alissa that really stick out to me personally about the kinds of connections between the history of a system and how it impacts users in beguiling and sometimes upsetting ways Cataloguing Trauma and Indigenous names in authority records: the case of Jandamarra.

First off – this is the best title of any blog out there, no competition. I came to reading the work of Chris Bourg I think through the #critlib tag on Twitter – and although she doesn’t update as frequently anymore the archives of this blog are really deep and rich. So many posts feel timeless and important to me such as The unbearable whiteness of librarianship and when words matter despite them being situated in/connected to specific events. I strive to balance my voice as well as Chris does between critical analysis and interpersonal connection to what is going on – hopefully without being too much of a copycat of course.

I’ve been reading Sara Ahmed since my time as an undergrad, and I think as valuable as librarian specific blogs are to me I also try and read work from the ‘the academy’ more widely as well. It amazes me that someone who is writing… quite a lot of books? Like sometimes as many as once a year – has time to also write blog posts that are often seering commentary on current events/discourses in academia. I will always remember Ahmed’s response to the outcrys about using trigger warnings in academia and how ready people are to say students are the cause of the problem when they respond appropriately to the pretty rough world we work, teach, and try to live in: “So much violence is justified and repeated by how those who refuse to participate in violence are judged. We need to make a translation. The idea that being over-sensitive is what stops us from addressing difficult issues can be translated as: we can’t be racist because you are too sensitive to racism.” Right on. Another searing and more recent post I would recommend is Queer use.

And maybe to top it off/have something to hold myself accountable to Three topics I would like to delve into in future posts:

  • A deeper dive into archives and affect – with some help/specific reference to the ‘Crying in the Archives’ by Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath and sections from the ‘An Archive of Feelings’ by  Ann Cvetkovich
  • Why Don’t Academic Libraries Have Access To A Freakin’ E-Book Platform for Novels, or Why I Still Make My Library Buy Paper Books And Will Keep Getting In Trouble For It I Guess
  • Florilegia: collections of text fragments from what I’m reading