Author: Hugh Rundle

Hugh is one of the co-founders of newCardigan, and officially serves as Secretary. You may know him from the Aus GLAM Blogs app, @lib_papers Twitter bot, or ausglam.space community. When not doing amateur systems administration, writing bad code, or reading radical literature, Hugh works as an academic librarian.

GLAM Blog Club May – Snap

GLAM Blog Club

In April we lowered the Jolly Roger and launched our new GLAM Blog Club theme, Obsession. Our bloggers rose to the challenge.

Lynda Kelly kicked off the month with a quick #ThrowbackThursday post revisiting a study conducted at the Australian Museum with very young audiences. The ALIA Sustainable Libaries group, and yours truly both wrote about the Easter break, albeit in different ways. Alisa shared a thoughtful post about making a job change voluntarily as her life priorities have changed, Andrew wrote about the dangers of letting career planning become an obsession, whilst Danielle completed her two-part series on what to do if the job search isn’t voluntary.

Nicole shared some news: if you hurry, you can make it to the Textiles in Bloom exhibition at Villa Alba in the Melbourne suburb of Kew this weekend. Kate wrote up some great notes from the Recordkeeping Roundtable session on theory, models and strategies for today’s workplace, whilst Barbara shared reflections on the same session.

Alissa used to be obsessed with Twitter, but now finds it’s too noisy and anxiety-inducing. Nikki’s deafness (or rather, the way it is often not accommodated) often leads her to feel the same way in social spaces – she shared some ways you can help to reduce “deaf anxiety”. Danielle returned to the office after 400 days of WFH, and also felt a bit overwhelmed and exhausted by the end of the day. The Mechanical Dolphin continued to crank out blog posts, on open education, islands of memory, pain, angels and uncertainty, innovators, and information architects.

David shared an assortment of interesting tech stuff, and I did the same thing (different stuff!). It appears I had a busy month because I also shared a little tool I made for yawping made with my latest obsession – the Rust programming language. Alissa, now that she’s got all this spare time since she’s not on Twitter, wrote a treatise about cataloguing the songlines (or is that song spirals?), and what it could look like.

Impressed by how much good stuff there is in all these posts and but sure how you’re going to keep it all in your head? Don’t worry, Inger has spent twenty years creating the perfect note taking system.

So now it’s May, and time for a new topic – Snap. Maybe you want to share your love of photography. Perhaps you had a close encounter with a crocodile. It could be that your patience ran out recently and you want to reflect on that. However you interpret the theme, be sure to tag your post GLAM Blog Club, and share it on social media with #GLAMBlogClub. If you’ve not already registered you blog, you can do so at Aus GLAM Blogs and your fresh posts will be automatically shared with the world on Twitter, Mastodon and at glamblogs.newcardigan.org. Happy blogging!

cardiCards

Announcements

The last year has been a tough one, and we know many of you are missing your GLAM fam. For our birthday in June we will be sharing messages from the newCardigan community, to the newCardigan community – so we need your help!

Here’s how it will work:

Send us a postcard with your message to Australasian GLAM workers by the end of May, and we’ll share them with the newCardigan community all through June! Your message can be a note, a poem, a drawing, a tiny essay, a photo – anything Australia Post will let you send through the mail on A6 (105mm × 148mm) cardboard!

We’ll share an image of one card a day on Instagram and Twitter, publish your messages on our website at the end of June, turn them into a cardiCards zine, and add them as our first deposit into the cardiArchive for posterity.

Post your postcard via ye olde snail mail to:

newCardigan
PO Box 51
Abbotsford VIC 3067

We can’t wait to collect our mail!!!

GLAM Blog Club December – Lessen

GLAM Blog Club

And so this cursed year draws to a close, not with a bang but with a GLAM Blog Club theme. We drew December’s theme out of a random word generator so we’ll end the year on the theme Lessen. With two “e”s. Have you lessened your travel time this year with positive results? Has lessened social interaction been a boon or a tragedy? Have you done more with less, less with less, or less with more? Make of the topic what you will.

Remember to tag your blog post GLAM Blog Club and use the hashtag #GLAMBlogClub on social media. Registering on the Aus GLAM Blogs site makes it easier for everyone to find your blog!

In case you need inspiration, here’s some blog posts our community posted in November:

On the theme of Invalid

ALIA Sustainable Libraries Group offered 3 invalid excuses for not helping to save the world…

Transgressive Archivist told us Your Data Is Invalid: Collecting Data On Sex, Gender, And Sexuality

I pontificated about Empathy Daleks

Alissa reflected On Agency.

Freestyle posts

Ellen reviewed How to create a relevant public space by Aat Vos

Mal has been digitising magazines and newsletters from the Tattersall’s Club and is sharing what he’s found.

Inger shouted about WhisperFest.

Rebecca went to Sculpture by the River.

Transgressive Archivist’s guest blogger asked us not to judge a homeless book by its cover.

Lynda has been analysing AMaGA’s research on how COVID has affected the GLAM sector – she’s done so much there is both Part 1 and Part 2!

Snail likes to buy first editions on spec.I guess there are worse things to do with your disposable income.

We can’t wait to see what you write this month!

GLAM Blog Club November – Invalid

GLAM Blog Club

Our Blog Club topic for October may have been failure, but the cardi community didn’t fail to share some great blog posts.

Matt Finch appears to be on some kind of Kerouac-style writing bender, publishing a post nearly every day on an assortment of topics. Nicole started off the month with some great info about what to look out for if you want to wear your vintage 1920s fashion without a wardrobe malfunction. Edward Shaddow requested that we don’t make him tap the sign that says “Do no harm”, but I guess some institutions weren’t listening. Ellen encouraged us to be open about failure, whilst Avril gave us some tips on avoiding it. The Transgressive Archivist reflected on his own failures, and also reflected on reflecting on failure which was nice and meta. Jane shared some ideas about loneliness and libraries, Matthew shared his thoughts about the value of the global digital preservation community, and we learned all about Boyle Abbey from Ellen. Inger hates to fail, and wrote about how failure-avoidance can lead to imposter syndrome and burnout. Lynda shared a delightful story about her personal connection to PIPS potato chips and an oversized mechanical elephant. And in the middle of all of this, I shared some thoughts on what appears to be a complete failure of peer review at ITAL.

So what’s the theme for November, I hear you ask. This month we’ve got a topic you can read at least a couple of different ways: Invalid, You can write about being invalidated, being invalided, or neither of those at all. The theme, after all, is just to help get you started if you’re stuck for a topic – nothing you write will be invalid for inclusion in GLAM Blog Club.

Remember to tag your post GLAM Blog Club, use the hashtag #GLAMBlogClub when sharing on social media, and register your blog at glamblogs.newcardigan.org if you’ve not already done so. That’s also where you can find the latest and greatest blog posts from the Australasian GLAM community.

Now get writing!