ONE PIC FROM TODAY

ONE THING I DIDN’T DO TODAY

Fold all that washing on the end of the sofa.

I didn’t see a show.

No travel.

Taking time out while I can, before a few days of whirl.

ONE PIC FROM TODAY

ONE THING I DID TODAY

Cabaret-style seating had me in a bentwood chair at the front of a table, touching the stage as watched UK sisters Nichola and Rosie Dempsey, who perform as Flo and Joan.

Explore, find out more about them. I have always loved the wit, but missed the musicianship until I saw them live. Hearing them harmonise, and perform vocal gyrations perfectly in sync, reminded me of the pleasure of listening to Neil and Tim Finn. Sibling voices which blend uncannily beautifully. There is also a pretty mean recorder duet in Lady in the Woods. (Go on, go off and have a listen – laugh yourself silly on the first play through – then listen, really listen, to the harmonies in the second one).

They were the soundtrack to my three years of teaching at UniSA. I added topics on misinformation, disinformation, fake news and ex-information. (Ex-information is what is deliberately excluded and the impact of this is worth further study. [I was going to link to a definition, but Google is not my friend here. I am not divorcing anyone, so what it did retrieve was not helpful]).

Every study period I would work out whether I could still justify including the clip below. I did – and played it deep into the night as I revised topics in the Information Retrieval unit. I told students that they did not have to watch it. Not at all. I just couldn’t bring myself to keep teaching the unit without their company each time I updated that bit of the course.

The song’s refrain “better do your research”, I used as entre to get students to read Barbara Fister’s Lizard People in the Library provocation, written as part of Project Information Literacy. In it she describes how the idea of “do your own research” – the refrain of many librarians (not just Flo and Joan) was horribly subverted by conspiracy theorists in the US of the early 2020s.

Horrible Histories Fake News Song by Flo and Joan.

ONE PIC FROM TODAY

ONE THING I DID TODAY

I had 8 meetings back to back, including an online briefing about the Very Important People our office was going to lunch with, plus the lunch itself. And one and a half hours of the course about community management for science researchers.

Tomorrow is looking a bit better.. only seven meetings.

Most meetings are generated by next week’s symposium – running through sessions with speakers to finalise what and how they will deliver; finalising dietary requirements; whether all the AV equipment listed in the AV contract makes sense; talking with the MC about event aims and purposes; creating all the runsheets and stationery lists and merchandise lists and printing lists.. then allocating jobs to a very nice team and checking they have all they need.

Cabaret Festival, preparing for symposium and travelling next week are all converging. I will still do my best to try to match snail’s stellar 30 day posting record from Blogjune last year.

ONE PIC FROM TODAY

This shows the city from a ridge of a walking track that begins just behind my office. It’s a public holiday today, so I did a long bushwalk with friends before returning home to create runsheets for a symposium I am running in Melbourne next week.

ONE THING I DID TODAY

Well, a few days ago. Quietly. Soft launch.

Changed the name of this blog from Librarian Smatter to Kathrynarium.

I had changed it once before from “Librarians Matter”. My blog pre-dated the Black Lives Matter movement by a good half-decade, but keeping the name looked like I was trivialising something that needed a bit more respect. The domain name, “librariansmatter.com”, still make sense when I moved the S across.

You will hear more before the end of the month about whether, 34 years after qualifying professionally, I still think of myself as a librarian. This blog definitely is drifting away from being mainly about libraries and technology. “Kathrynarium” was the name of my second experimental blog I started using the Bloglines RSS reader (that also allowed you to write posts that could be syndicated). My first? Kathrynosaurus.

I’m no stranger to name changing. When my kids were born, their dad and I changed our different family names to a brand new one. I used to say that I took my kid’s name.

My first name changed this year too. Well, at work when I changed jobs at least. My line manager is called Kathryn. So was another employee, with a smattering of “Catherines” in the same very small organisation. So, to disambiguate, I voluntarily took the name “Kit”. Just searching my emails to try to locate anything from the person interviewing me (who had the same name) convinced me.

ONE PIC FROM TODAY

It’s a tiny movie that takes a bit of time to load. The berries on the common hackberry almost touching my balcony have matured enough for me to share my space with lorikeets for a couple of weeks. You can hear at the end that I also share the space with an intrigued cat.

Last week, Graeme wrote a series of posts about the differences between academic and public libraries, based on a lighting talk he gave to Kingston Library in April.

He made a post a day where he discussed differences in:

• Access and community
• Staff heirarchy
• The physicality
• The respect
• Money budgets and business models
• Reflection on changing sectors

I’d second most of what he said. Especially about different talents you nurture in each, and the relationships to money and clients.

I started as a 19 year old in academic libraries, as an after-hours library clerk, which saw me through uni over five years. I returned to work in an academic library from 2001-2009 as a reference librarian, philosophy subject librarian and then emerging technologies specialist. I did a stint in 2020 as senior librarian, copyright, for another university. I finished my time as a university lecturer last year by designing and delivering the first Australian postgraduate course in scholarly communications.

I worked in public libraries from 1992 – 1999 in systems and community information roles. I returned to publics for a year from 2009 to 2010, doing systems and young adult work. When I began my university lecturing career in 2010, a course called “Public libraries” was among the units I taught for a couple of years.

One thing missing from Graeme’s list was – what public holidays mean for each sector.

In academic libraries, busy periods tend to follow exam time and major assessments. Toward the end of the year is time to catch up on all that housekeeping and admin you missed during the year. Most universities actually shut down all buildings from about the week before Christmas until just after New Year. Apart from minimal service-desk shifts, you actually have to write an email to your supervisor justifying why you need to work during that period.

Public holidays in public libraries! Oh the shock when I moved from academic back into publics in 2009, used to the gentle, productive down period of the Christmas holidays. We used to joke that clients acted as though the library would be shut for three years, not three days, over Easter. The days before the public holiday huge numbers of clients would swarm in and clear out the stock. Then the day after the public holiday we would feel very missed – with more clients visiting than average, telling us how important we were in their lives, swamping us with returns. And- the seasonal presents in the public libraries I worked in! Grateful clients would bake, drop off crafts, and in one library somebody paid for “all the library staff to go out to dinner”. This happened in December, but I am not 100% sure that was a Christmas gift though, it may have been part of someone’s will??

ONE PIC FROM TODAY

Hurtle Square. Yarn-bombed.

ONE THING I DID TODAY

Cycled (on my working manual bike) down to the Cabaret Festival to do a life-drawing session. I expected either a lot of fun and giggles, but no serious drawing, or a chance to really take time to draw some pretty amazing costumes and poses. Neither. Ruby Chew, a local artist and educator took us through using a sighting stick to measure and check angles and sizes of key proportions in a figure. It’s not something I have done before, and I found it extremely useful. We had a single model, a local burlesque performer who started with a large velvet hat, and a negligee over her costume, but steadily disrobed piece-by-piece with each pose.

We used charcoal, both willow and as pencils, not Apple pencils at all – although last time I did lifedrawing at my local pub in Freo, I did experiment with drawing using my iPad. I found the surface a bit restrictive, and realised the expansive feeling of moving my hand across page is part of the attraction.

Why the title of the post? Genevieve mentioned in her post today Rocketing rocket books, Batman that she’s not keen to commit to an Apple Pencil because she is concerned she may lose it. I use my Apple Pencil several times a day, and it changed my life for the better. I take notes in meetings, make lists, mark up PDFs, and now have access to all those bits of my brain that process information better when movement is involved. So, maybe this cheap bit of purpose-built elastic with a little pouch that I bought from eBay when I first got my iPad may be useful for Genevieve too?

ONE PIC OF SOMETHING I DID TODAY:

That’s it for today. It counts for blogjune.

ONE PIC FROM TODAY

ONE THING I DID TODAY

Cooked this wonderful find for dinner.

After using dried borlotti beans all my life, I discovered the joys of the freshly shelled and cooked version in my local fruit and veg shop a couple of months before I left Fremantle. They are creamy and soft and subtle. I tried to find them in the Adelaide Central Markets, but no-one had heard of them. Then, having accepted long ago that I would not find any here, I found a huge pile at the Showgrounds Farmers Market on Sunday.

So….

Ingredients:

1. Freshly shelled borlotti beans
2. Three bruised garlic cloves
3. Half a tomato (I used cut up cherry tomatoes)
4. Three sprigs of thyme
5. Two bay leaves

Boil all together for 40 minutes or so, until the beans are creamy.

Use a slotted spoon to remove just the beans from the pot.

• 6. Olive oil
• 7. Balsamic vinegar
• 8. Ground black pepper
• 9. Sea salt
• 10. Italian parsley leaves

Season the beans and toss in the parsley.

Serve on their own. Or with freshly roasted capsium and brown rice, like I did.

ONE PIC FROM TODAY

ONE THING I DID TODAY

Dealt with the aftermath of a one litre Pyrex glass jug self-destructing in my 14 year old dishwasher, and the door seal tearing off in the intricate cleanup to remove shards from the filter and rubber pipes.

It took time. And money.

On the up side, I now have a three month subscription to Choice online, so if anyone wants me to look up reviews for any appliances, just let me know.