In this episode Sophie Shilling, Digital Information Specialist at the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), shares what it’s been like to start a new job during COVID lockdown in Melbourne, and has some thoughts and links she’d like to share in her blog below.

“I’m the Digital Information Specialist at the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), and during the pandemic I’ve been living and working on Boonwurrung land. I started working for BoM in the middle of Stage 4 restrictions, so I’ve never actually worked in the office. I had to get creative to make this video, as the restrictions of being new in the role and of COVID-19 meant that I couldn’t give a tour or even a virtual tour, so instead I’m answering 73 Questions á la Vogue about the job, starting in lockdown, working from home, and how I got to where I am.

For the first half of 2020 I was managing the Royal Historical Society of Victoria’s digital collections and answering the curliest of questions at Museums Victoria. You’ll see in the video that it is clearly Christmastime – as of filming I had been working at BoM for less than six months. It’s been a big change from small cultural collections to an agency with data and information in the order of petabytes.

I hope you find the video enjoyable and informative – I’ve linked the bits and pieces referenced throughout below. My thanks to Paul O’Farrell for helping produce the video – all I did was talk, really, It would be remiss of me not to credit him here as cameraman, director, producer, editor, disembodied voice, and chief font detective to get it to look juuust like the Vogue videos.

Podcasts: Still Processing and The Subtlety of It. Virtual GLAM: Coffs Collections, WDPD2020 video, Bayard Bioblitz. TV recommendation: Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty. Book recommendations: Sand Talk – Tyson Yunkaporta, and All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr. Sign the Open Letter to RMIT University Senior Executive to keep running the awesome Master of Information Management course.”