Actually, it might be better at home, in the loungeroom where you can fully release your interpretive dance moves without pesky social constraints like diginity and professional behaviour. Regardless, the glam blog club theme for May “Passion” behoves me to share with you a story from my past, starting with this song.
Dreamweaver I believe you can get me through the night
What I love best about this song is that I first heard it during a Gurlesque show in the early 2000s. For readers unfamiliar with the wonders of Gurlesque, it was a Sydney lesbian strip club night, and the hosts Sex Intense and Glita Supernova opened up a truly amazing space of, for and about female desire outside of trad hetro porn. They invited queer performers both professional and experimental. Strippers who regularly shaved their bits took turns with free flowing hairy Fine Art students and gender studies majors. Tattooed and muscly circus performers whipped off their kit mid hoola hoop flourishes and amateurs constructed incredibly elaborate stage installations with a visceral trashy punk aesthetic, literally leaking into the audience. That night, Sex and Glita’s Dreamweaver performance riffed on a 70’s pink teen bedroom fantasy of getting ravaged by a gothic monster. It was especially hilarious because probably half the audience* were dykes working tech/multimedia jobs and well familiar with Dreamweaver (the HTML editing software of the day). So everytime I hear this song, and others from that dreamy 70s disco era, I cack myself remembering Glita’s melodramatic histrionics, Sex’ spooky clown face, and their camp panto slapstick aesthetic. They were SO CAMP! SO HILARIOUS! I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said their work gave me a reason to live.
Fly me high through the starry skies
Hell, I was a student myself, fully invested in underground queer feminist performance community in the inner west of Sydney. I wrote my honours thesis on nightclub performances and how they cohered community in the witching hours of 12-3am in gay and lesbian nightclubs: “Quick, there’s a show!” In exploring these communities and passions – Drag, strip, BDSM, I became aware of the fragility of their ephemeral, unofficial nature. These short durational performances – often only the length of a song (or 3 for a full strip!) were largely undocumented or archived. How would you know about them if you weren’t there? Who will record their history – the volunteers of ALGA alone? It was a good enough reason to enrol in a Librarian Masters. You know what they say – follow your passion.
Dream Leaver
It’s been some time since I’ve graduated, and I’ve taken a detour from that passion to pursue a career in academic libraries, specialising in research data management. This year, I’ve taken another detour from that to gain managerial experience, in an acting team leader position for our science and technology Librarians. The hardest thing has been letting go of my substantive role in order to concentrate on my current role. Things are really taking off in RDM, the field is growing, international collaborations are developing, institutional infrastructure is actually maturing, and after what felt like forever (be still thou earnestly beating millienial heart!) we can see a shift in attitudes and expectations in how students and researchers ask for data support through the Library. Our users are actually asking us questions! And here I am over here learning how to support a team of librarians who don’t necessarily share the same passions as I do. Do I need to develop a passion for something I don’t have in order to be an effective leader? What am I actually passionate about?
Fly me away to the bright side of the moon
This has actually been a great opportunity to turn my Kryptonite (distraction) into a learning opportunity – quite literally. (Again with the literal!) I personally love learning things. I used to think it was just a simple love of learning, but I could probably be quite candid at this stage and tell you that honestly I just love knowing the right answer, or knowing how to find out. Is this why you became a Librarian too? I’m one of those people who enjoy reflective practice, and love a good HR workshop on mindful leadership or developing resilience. I frequently use organisational development courses as active engagement exercises with people in other units across the institution, because sharing learning experiences with people across discipline and functional areas enables me to develop meaningful relationships across our organisation. And that’s my remit as a Librarian, focussing on STEMM areas, to get to know our users’ needs and challenges, so that we can better provide support where they need it most.
I believe we can reach the morning light
One of those growing challenges is in the area of digital and data literacy – just ever so slightly touching on one of my passions. In our Library last year we embarked on a project to learn a new digital skill, in order to support our offerings in digital and data literacy. It didn’t matter what it was, or even if it could only tangentially relate to our day jobs. We paired this initiative with using the CLARA tool – a research validated survey instrument – to discover our learning dispositions, in an effort to manage our own learning as we tackled a new skill. I discovered I was closer to ‘fragile dependence’ than ‘rigid persistence’. I am full of hope and optimism, curiosity and creativity, and rate belonging and collaboration highly in my learning experiences. Reflecting on these values now, I can see some hints to why I followed Alice down the GLAM rabbithole in search of archiving skills for undocumented and unofficial performance histories.
*This is memoir – exaggerations convey authenticity.
marvelling 