Nik is an archivist at Museums Victoria, photographer, chatterbox, GLAM geek, horror fan, event planner. Joined cardiCore in December 2015, Nik is current Vice-President. Working with fellow cardiCore is important to Nik as the GLAM community needs safe spaces to share knowledge and explore the future direction of our profession. Nik is also on the committee of the Australian Society of Archivists Victorian Branch, which shares newCardigan values of inclusivity, knowledge sharing and creating safe spaces.
While cardiParties are on hold due to the lockdown, we have begun to reach out to our GLAM community with cardiShorts. Videos (5-10mins) taken by a member of our community, either working from home, or going in to work, sharing an aspect of their work during COVID-19.
In this episode Shane Hughes, Keeper, Live Exhibits at Melbourne Museum, introduces us to the different animals, back of house Live Exhibits storage areas and the Forest Gallery at Melbourne Museum. The video was shot before Melbourne Museum reopened to the public. Many of the animals from Live Exhibits were taken home by Keepers while the Museum was closed.
Trigger warning: this video includes spiders, just in case you have a phobia!
Here is a list of the different animals that appear in the video:
01:09 Growling Grass Frogs and Green Tree Frog empty enclosure
01:19 Leather Jacket Fish
01:39 Lord Howe Island Stick Insects (juveniles)
02:18 Golden Orb Weaving Spider
02:32 Golden Orb Weaving Spider
02:49 Golden Orb Weaving Spider
03:10 Golden Orb Weaving Spider
03:34 Coulon
03:43 Dermestid Beetles
03:49 Thorny Devil
04:53 Central Victorian Funnelweb & Blue Mountains Funnelweb
05:05 Sutherland’s Funnelweb
05:15 Blue Mountains Funnelweb
08:16 Purple Crowned Lorikeet
Do you work in GLAM and would you like to do a short video for cardiShorts? For beginner filmmakers, Andrew Kelly has written a blog with some helpful pointers. If you’re interested in submitting a cardiShort, please contact us at hello@newcardigan.org.
newCardigan is five years old this month. If we were a human, we’d be “going” to school over Zoom by now! Normally we like to have a little birthday cardiParty in June, but things are weird this year. Instead, every day this week one of the ‘cardiCore’ will be sharing their personal reflections on the first five years of newCardigan. Please share your own reflections with us on your favourite social media, your blog, as a video or audio recording, an email, or via ye olde postal service. We can’t wait to read, hear and watch them.
Image: GLAM Walking Tour, Hayley Webster and Gemma Steele, Museums Victoria’s Library, Rare Book Collection, Melbourne Museum, January 2018
What a strange time to turn 5. Lockdown has given us all time to reflect. What does newCardigan mean to me? It’s a lifeline to a community that has grown and become a significant part of the GLAM sector in Melbourne and Perth, and beyond, over the past 5 years.
On 12 June 2015 newCardigan hosted the very first cardiParty. Sadly I wasn’t there for that, but a friend brought me along to my first cardiParty in September, then in December Hugh asked me to join cardiCore. I’m incredibly thankful for being part of this community.
Image: GLAM Walking Tour, Clare O’Hanlon at RMIT Gallery, January 2017
When I think back, the thing I’ve taken away from all of those cardiParties, are all the conversations I’ve had with cardies about finding their community. One cardie said to me, after recently moving to Melbourne from Canberra, ‘I’ve found my people’. That’s what newCardigan means to me.
Image: GLAM Walking Tour, curator Julie McLaren giving a tour of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, January 2019
I have so many happy and proud memories with newCardigan. GLAM walking tours have been such a crazy logistical challenge to organise, but they have always been so much fun on the day! We had a GLAM walking tour planned for this year, but sadly we have had to postpone. For anyone who has been on one, it’s a rollercoaster ride of a day, a short stop at each of the four sites, and a walk between (two years running it rained cats and dogs!)… It’s like having four cardiParties in one day, exhausting, stimulating and heaven.
In January 2017 we had our first GLAM walking tour, it rained, as we walked through Melbourne from the Athenaeum Library, to the Shot Tower Museum in Melbourne Central, to RMIT Gallery, and finishing the day at RMIT Design Archives. Such a memorable day. The following year, January 2018, it rained, as we made our way from the Centre for Contemporary Photography to Melbourne Museum where we heard from the Library, Palaeontology, and Archives. I remember 40 cardies in a large room at Melbourne Museum, all wet from our walk, but still beaming with enthusiasm and excitement at the incredible rare books, fossils and archives on display. Last year we headed to Ballarat, it was a very sunny hot day as we made our way from the Art Gallery of Ballarat, to the Ballarat Mechanics Institute where we explored the library and archive collection, then a very hot long walk to the Gold Museum after lunch. I know, we’re crazy to host GLAM Walking Tours in January. We were going to break that tradition this year. I can’t tell you how excited I’ll be at our next GLAM Walking Tour. I can’t wait.
While cardiParties are on hold due to the lockdown, we have begun to reach out to our GLAM community with cardiShorts. Videos (5-10mins) taken by a member of our community, either working from home, or going in to work, sharing an aspect of their work during COVID-19.
Bentley Bird is an Ornithology Museum Specialist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In this episode, Bentley shares what her job was before lockdown (data management, pest management, conservation projects, collection access, curatorial projects); and what her job is like now while she works from home cleaning up specimen data including geo-referencing. Big thank you to Bentley for this interesting insight into the work of an Ornithology Museum Specialist. We miss you at Melbourne Museum. Stay safe and all the best to you and your family.
While cardiParties are on hold due to the lockdown, we have begun to reach out to our GLAM community with cardiShorts. Videos (5-10mins) taken by a member of our community, either working from home, or going in to work, sharing an aspect of their work during COVID-19.
In this episode Imogen Telfer, Air Force Imagery Archive Curator at RAAF Museum, introduces us to the RAAF Museum exhibitions in a virtual tour. Please note that as the video was taken indoors in large open spaces and outside the RAAF Museum building, the ambient sounds occasionally overlap Imogen’s presentation.
We were planning a cardiParty with Imogen before lockdown which we sadly had to cancel. Thanks for sharing this cardiShort Imogen, it’s a wonderful substitute for a cardiParty but I hope we can organise an event at RAAF Museum sometime in the future!
While we can’t bring our cardiParties to our community due to the COVID-19 lockdown, we are instead sharing cardiShorts. Short videos by members of the GLAM community working from home but still able to share an aspect of their work.
In Episode 1, Michaela Hart, Digital Archivist at Department of Health and Human Services, brings us into her home study to share with us how she has set up a digitisation station (using a tripod, camera, light source and Type 1 box) and demonstrating the digitisation process with a glass lantern plate.
Michaela hopes you’re doing well and her 10 minute video makes your feel better. Thank you Michaela, it sure did make me forget my troubles for awhile.
We invite our GLAM community to send us more short videos to share in this series. If you would like to share a video, get in contact with us. We’re interested in videos between 5-10 minutes related to an aspect of your work.
Walking on a tight rope Melly shares what it’s like to have to let go of a collection when moving from one team to the next, knowing that nobody will take over care of the collection, that it’s down to management what happens to the collection next.
Paths, Mike’s keynote at the 2019 Research Applications in Information and Libraries Conference explores context, “relationships, pathways and the in-between”.
A GLAMorous look at Midsumma 2020, Clare reviews the program for introverts and GLAM peeps, stating that the program has “some good intersectional LGBTIQ+ representation.”
Do No Harm, Edward states that most libraries don’t have a framework to be part of social change, such as anti-oppression, intersectional feminism, and prison abolition.
#NotEnoughSciFi: To Write Like a Woman, Matt discusses the theory of Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, “overlapping identities and systems of oppression” through a lens of Science Fiction and Fantasy recently published works.
Thanks for all who wrote on this month’s theme. The theme for December is ‘free’, thanks to Bonnie Wildie. Would you like to see the cost of entry to your museum to be free? Do you believe in free access to information? What do you think should be free and what should incur a fee in your GLAM work place? Should overdue book returns be free? We look forward to reading your blogs.
Tag your blog post “GLAM Blog Club”, tweet a link to it using #GLAMBlogClub, and register your blog at glamblogs.newcardigan.org. Happy blogging!
