For October’s GLAM Blog Club theme we chose How I ended up here. As usual, the newCardigan community have delivered an interesting array of blog posts.
Rebecca got in early with a trip down memory lane to her early trips to the museum, when she was always wowed by the dinosaur bones. She tells us about her years juggling multiple volunteer and casual jobs before she finally nailed a full time role at Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum. She wasn’t quite as early as Mike Jones, however, who actually inspired October’s theme with his post way back in January called How did I end up here?
Anne reflected on her varied past roles and provided some great advice:
I encourage everyone to think of their career like Dorothy’s journey through Oz. Expect to meet some colourful characters and fields full of poppies, encounter flying monkeys and the odd wicked witch. But you learn from these experiences.
Clare shared her journey as a collector, music lover, and people-person: a tale of bars, DJing and records of all types, whilst Nathan celebrated the great mentors who have helped him along the way. Lydia got a little meta and explained how she started her blog because of GLAM Blog Club. w00t!
Nik wrote about how her passion for photography and interest in personal stories has helped her as an archivist, whilst Danielle conspiratorially whispered to us in a dingy bar, sharing a tale of science, Oprah, and being tortured by book cases. Sharing Danielle’s science background, Andrew wrote his very first GLAM Blog Club post about moving from lab safety to librarianship.
Stacey shared her success story of moving from volunteer school library cataloguer and primary carer to full time digital services librarian. I managed two posts on this month’s theme, writing about dumb luck, fear and patriarchy, with a follow-up about learning to code. Meanwhile, Jaye told us about her apprenticeship on steroids, co-authoring the third edition of Preserving Digital Materials, and the skills she’s applied to librarianship from her career in television.
Alissa took us on a journey from ancient history to metadata nerdery via a call centre, Matthew shared his past as a photography student long on skills and short on experience whilst ‘Edward’ told us how he was destined to be a librarian from his earliest years from his early years.
Clare gave a shoutout to all the ‘Queeroes and allies’ she has met in her GLAM life, and helpfully provided a reading list. Andrew narrowly avoided a career as an engineer and instead committed to a solid investment in his future – librarianship! Justine told us to read her knuckles, Kassi told us that librarianship is for the determined and Annelie shared some lessons learned about becoming a Research Archivist.
In November we’re back to the one-word themes, and we’d love to read your thoughts about balance. Have you mastered work-life balance, or are you balancing something else in your life? Do you have some thoughts on objectivity and balance in GLAM institutions? Are you balancing study and work? Or does ‘balance’ mean something else entirely to you? Let us know!
As always, please remember to tag your blog post as “GLAM Blog Club” (three separate words in one tag), and if you share it on social media, use the alternate tag “#GLAMBlogClub” there. If your blog isn’t registered with Aus GLAM Blogs yet, register it here.
Happy blogging!
