GLAM Blog Club
Writings about galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
Ghost Writing For Myself
I’ve been trying to think of an interesting angle for this topic all month and have yet to come up with something high level and meaningful. These past few months I’ve been inspired by Caroline J. Dale’s excellent TinyLetter Private Dickhead. The way she spins a tale, weaving interesting history with life experiences into a smashing good read. I lack the ability to match her own unique style so this will be more like an homage, the kind you’ll look at and go “huh, yeah I kind of see it…but not r
Uncomfortable GLAM
Authors note: I write this blog post from a very privileged position. Being a white male in my thirties, I acknowledge that my 'safe' is not the same as others. I can afford to take risks that might get someone else fired, ostracised, attacked, and silenced. As I wrote in my last GLAM blog club post, I feel privileged people should take risks and stand up for those who can't, but never at the expense of those we hope to help. Safe means many things to many different people and has even more co
START FIX
This month, as I was thinking about the Aus GLAM Blog Club theme of silence, I played Tacoma, the new game from Fullbright who did 'Gone Home'. Apart from being a great game that manages to be fun and inclusive it uses a very interesting mechanic that you could almost skip over - ASL. American Sign Language (ASL) is used almost as an aside when your character wants to interact with the space station's computer interface. Inputing in passwords or using it to run commands like 'start fix' to trigg
Silence of the GLAMs
This month has been a bit of a struggle for me and while I have had many ideas for this month's theme getting the spoons together to write it has taken a while. So here we are on the last day of the month with lots of ideas but not much energy or motivation to write them. If you will permit me, I will walk you through the variations on the theme of 'silence' and hopefully by the end I can wrap it all up with a nice .gif or something. Because, in the end isn't life just a series of .gifs? Silen
What's in a Name?
This month's #GLAMblogclub topic is identity, and there are some great posts coming out around it. For me, I'm going to stay in my lane and discuss a topic that I get asked a fair bit; who is Edward Shaddow? This comes up fairly regularly for me, most often at conferences and face-to-face meetings. I regularly introduce myself as [real name] and get a polite blank stare. When I follow that up with 'I'm also Edward Shaddow on the internets' most people will change expression to that of recognit
The Library of our Discontent
Fear. Fear takes many forms, from childhood nightmares to crippling anxieties. I experienced a lot of fear this past month, mostly around getting this blog post done in time (my fears were realised), but there were professional fears too. Will my public PC system crash (yes, repeatedly), will anyone come to my NLS8 presentation (yes), will I mess it up (no). As I've been mentally writing this blog I've spoken to a lot of people, and over the past few weeks I think I've worked out what I fear the
Time Enough at Last
The GLAM Blog Club theme this month is GLAM 3017. While I'm an avid sci-fi and space opera fan. I tend to avoid looking this far ahead in GLAM, lest I be called a <shudders>, 'futurist'. Who am I to turn down a challenge though? Let us begin. I am not going to reference Star Wars in this blog as that was set 'a long time ago' and is therefore in the past. I will look ahead instead at one of my favourite thoughts, that of a dystopian future. A future where our current world has long since past.
That's A Damn Inferior Cup of Coffee
I've been working in libraries for around sixteen years now. Being in any industry that long it's hard to not become jaded and cynical [citation needed]. I admit that it's hard watching things go round in circles, the same issues being debated, knocked back, debated, shelved, picked up...etc. You know what though, I'm trying to see it differently. Sure, there will be things that happen that I will dislike. Things that cause me to sigh heavily, clutch my pearls, and drink under my desk. However
The Rule of GLAM
I'm going to preface this by saying I am a terrible student. I've never really enjoyed studying and struggle to take tests and assignments seriously as I prefer real life practical tests of my knowledge. This is reflected in the way I've taught myself outside of educational institutions. The way I learn code is pulling apart other code and even then only when there is a real life example in front of me. I taught myself html because I needed a website. I learn just enough Linux commands to get me
Trust No One...
"Deep Throat said "trust no one." And that's hard, Scully. Suspecting everyone, everything, it wears you down. You even begin to doubt what you know is the truth. Before, I could only trust myself. Now, I can only trust you... and they've taken you away from me." - Fox Mulder, The X-Files When the topic of 'trust' was announced for GLAM Blog Club I honestly had too many ideas to talk about. There is the trust people put in libraries, the trust libraries put on people, how much we (don't) t