Beyond Selidor

An overly melodramatic title for this post? We'll see on Thursday night. But it really has felt that I've spent the past two weeks storing up happiness in case I need to remember the feeling later, trying to do as much as possible in some kind of frenzy to keep the fear at bay.

( Last weekend in London )

( TV, books and films of the past two weeks )

This weekend began with the annual Christmas party for Cambridge librarians, which one of the booksellers in the town always puts on for us. It was nice to spend a few hours with Matthias, notasapleasure and her husband, clutching glasses of mulled wine and moving around the bookshelves, while outside the rain poured down. The books in the shop are discounted to librarians during the Christmas party, and a lot of my colleagues use this as opportunity to buy all their Christmas presents, but I was restrained and bought nothing.

Yesterday was the annual Mill Road Winter Fair, when all the restaurants, cafes and other shops throw open their doors and sell hot food from stalls outside, joined by live music, various food trucks and other market sellers. Last year Matthias had been too sick with a cold to go, but this year we were determined, and spent a nice few hours out in the sunshine, eating, drinking, and generally enjoying one of my favourite events of the Cambridge year.

Today has been all about resting and recuperating, drinking soup and tea, preparing meals in advance for next week, and writing another Yuletide treat. I've now written four fics for the collection — my main assignment, and three treats — and have two ideas for more fic percolating in my mind. The best I've ever managed has been four fics per Yuletide, so if I can get these two written in the next week it will be my most productive year by far. I'm hoping all will be well received.

What's everyone else been up to, this weekend or otherwise?

I came across this book meme a while ago, and had been waiting until I had a clear month or so to complete it. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, so feel free to steal it and do the meme yourself if you'd like.

Day one is a tough one: favourite book from childhood.

Now, depending on how old I was when you asked me this question, the answer would change quite a bit. I am a fairly loyal reader, and even in childhood I tended to have long stretches of time where a particular book was my favourite — and these can roughly be set out as follows:

( Books behind the cut )

As I said before, I can talk about favourite childhood books forever, and would love to hear about yours, or discuss any of my favourites, in the comments.

( The other days )

Welcome, new people who have subscribed as a result of the friending meme. It's great to see so much activity here on Dreamwidth, and I'm really looking forward to getting to know you all.

Due to this flurry of activity, I thought it best to do an updated intro post. People who've had me in their circles for a while, please feel free to read or skip as you please. And both new and old people, please feel free to ask me any questions!

( Those things they see in me I cannot see myself )

There was a great surprise waiting for me this morning when I opened my work email: confirmation that my application to become a Chartered member of CILIP (the professional body for library and information professionals in the UK) had been successful. The chartership process involves documenting evidence of professional development (this can be formal training, conference or workshop attendance, or self-directed learning, and it needs to include work that demonstrates your knowledge of your own institution, as well as other libraries in different sectors), and writing a reflective statement evaluating your transformation over the course of the chartership process.

Chartership is not compulsory, and indeed opinion in my field is mixed as to its benefit, but it was something I wanted to do for myself. I don't have a library/information science degree, and have progressed as far as I have through the Cambridge library system through a combination of being known to the powers-that-be (simply because I worked in low-grade jobs in a large number of libraries), and having had teaching and research experience within the university due to having done two postgrad degrees at Cambridge. I've never been keen to get a librarianship MA, but instead have been taking various other steps to gain professional recognition and qualifications, of which CILIP Chartership is one.

In any case, it was nice to have some good news for a change!

[This post gets a very appropriate Noviana Una icon, because she spent part of her time running a resistance movement out of a never-burned-down Library of Alexandria in an alternate version of our own world, and while I'll never be that cool, we do have being library assistants in common!]

Content note: mention of victim blaming and abuse denial.

I, like many Tumblr users, received an email notifying me that I had unknowingly interacted with Russian propaganda accounts. I was pretty horrified by this, and did a search by username to determine the nature of these interactions. (If you wish to do the same thing, type the url YOURUSERNAME.tumblr.com/search/PROPAGANDAACCOUNTUSERNAME, replacing YOURUSERNAME with your Tumblr username and PROPAGANDAAACOUNTUSERNAME with the name of the Russian account(s) in question.)

I determined from this search that my interactions mainly consisted of reblogs from my own friends' accounts of fairly innocuous political/social justice-related content, which had originated with the propaganda accounts. For example:

A post about elections being compulsory and on weekends, which I reblogged from jimtheviking and added some comments about how this is already the case in Australia, my country of origin.

A post with a series of beautiful fanart of US black women athletes (Simone Biles, Serena Williams and so on) drawn as superheroes, which I had reblogged from thelxiepia.

A video interweaving Disney princesses and little girls being awesome, which I had reblogged from thelxiepia.

In other words, this was fairly bog standard content, which I would quite happily have shared had I found it myself, or if someone I know had linked to it themselves. However, when I consider the source, it takes on a much more sinister note - presumably these accounts were set up to target left-leaning USians, particularly those of marginalised identities, with the ultimate aim of discouraging them from voting. The revelation of the identity of the original posters has forced me to rethink my online presence and content, particularly on sites such as Tumblr and Twitter, which allow users to reblog/retweet other users' content, including content which originates with users who they are not following. This aspect of such sites had made me uneasy for a while, particularly as I had observed users sharing blatant misinformation (including, say, advice that would have had adverse effects in medical emergencies or other life-threatening situations), with any challenges going unnoticed.

Several years ago, I quietly made a decision not to share, link to, retweet/reblog or in any way amplify the words and work of people of any person I was aware of who had defended the actions of Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Requires Hate/Winterfox, enabled her behaviour, or minimised the effects her abuse had had on her targets. Even if these individuals said things with which I agreed, or shared information which I considered important, I would not amplify their words. Instead, I either found someone else sharing the same information, or I refrained from sharing it at all. I don't want to spend much more time on this tangent, as it's really not the subject of the post, except insofar as I'm planning to apply this principle much more broadly.

In other words, I've made the decision not to share posts, information or content unless it originates with people I know personally (family, offline friends, online friends with whom I've interacted significantly) or an identifiable public figure (note that I consider pseudonymous people to be 'public figures' if they have demonstrable interests, work, lives and connections with other people, so I'm not taking 'uses their own name' as synonymous with being a public figure). The only exceptions will be feeds dedicated to a specific kind of content (e.g. a feed I follow on Tumblr devoted solely to the art of Alphonse Mucha, a Twitter account that shares women's art), and I'll monitor these closely - if they suddenly start talking a lot about politics and stop posting artwork, for example, that would be a red flag.

Basically, what I'm not going to do is retweet or reblog content that I like, find amusing, agree with politically, or think provides important information unless I know the source, or investigate the source and find them to be credible. I know this goes against some of the major selling points of platforms like Tumblr and Twitter - the easy way to share other people's content without the pressure to add any of your own - but I would strongly encourage others to do the same, or at the very least subject your own online interactions to a level of scrutiny to which you did not previously subject them. It's very easy to see some content you like or agree with, and blindly click the reblog/retweet button. Resist the urge, stop and think, and do a little bit of investigating if you don't know or recognise the source, or if Twitter or Tumblr is the only place in which you've seen a particular piece of information being shared. Our platforms are only as strong as the people using them. For the most part, the sad truth is that the owners of social media platforms are not going to take responsibility for the content being shared on said platforms. That means we have to do so ourselves. We can't control what other people post, but we can control how widely it gets spread.

I've added a bunch of new people as a result of st_aurafina's recent friending meme, so I thought it was high time to introduce myself.

( Feel free to skip if you've had me in your circle/flist for a while )

I'm really looking forward to getting to know you! Please feel free to ask whatever questions you like.

Today I spent the morning teaching a bunch of bioinformatics PIs (who had come from institutions all over the world) how to create data management plans. It was different from my normal teaching sessions for two reasons: firstly, it was a broader audience (I normally only teach Cambridge staff and students), and secondly, it was senior academics (I normally teach undergrads, postgrads or postdocs). Even though I've taught variations on this content multiple times, I was a little bit nervous, and my anxiety was not helped by the fact that the teaching took place in a giant, shiny glass and steel conference centre, like some kind of futuristic space station planted way out in the fens, rather than in more familiar IT suites or seminar rooms within the university.

The session, however, went swimmingly. The researchers were engaged, interested, and curious, and asked perceptive and practical questions which we (I was delivering the training with two colleagues) were, for the most part, able to answer. Although we have not yet received feedback, it felt to me like one of my best training sessions ever.

It's funny how these things work out. I embarked on a career in librarianship feeling emotionally battered by six years in academia,* including a solid final year being rejected for close to one hundred academic jobs. It had made me doubt my own abilities and intelligence, and feel a little lost. I held onto my little foothold in academic librarianship for dear life. And yet two years on, after a year and a half in my current, teaching-focused role, I feel comfortable, confident, and challenged, with a clear professional path ahead of me, support for professional development, and a deep intellectual interest in my field. If you'd told me, ten, five, or even two years ago that I would become the kind of person who relished the prospect of standing up in the middle of a room of bioinformatics PIs and teaching them about data management, I would have been astonished.

___________________________
*Technically, only the last three years were hard. The MPhil, and the first two years of the PhD were wonderful. The year intermitting as a visiting scholar in Heidelberg, and the final year-and-a-half's slog were draining, in every sense of the word.

This weekend was the alumni festival at Cambridge, and my former department hosted a drinks reception on Saturday evening. Matthias and I went along, although we spent more time speaking with current PhD student and postdoc friends who are still based in Cambridge, rather than people who have moved on. It was great to just hang out with so many medievalists again, though. I say I want nothing to do with academia any more, but it really is wonderful to be able to talk to people about medieval Irish literature or Welsh manuscripts or Anglo-Saxon legal history and not have to justify why you might be interested in stuff like this. It reminded me how much I really did love my PhD subject and do enjoy talking about it from time to time, in contexts where the pressure to perform isn't there.

The reception also included a presentation by my friend Myriah, who is in the final stages of a PhD on the Black Book of Carmarthen, and whose research gained a lot of attention from the mainstream media earlier this year (to the extent that she was fielding questions from the BBC and the Washington Post on the one hand, and having her work misinterpreted by alien conspiracy theorists on the other). Her talk was essentially an expanded version of her earlier post on the departmental blog, with PowerPoint slides, and it sounds as if the experience was both surreal and rewarding.

After the reception, several people came back to our place to watch the rugby. I'm not a huge fan, but Matthias and many of our friends are, and I'm always happy to hang out with people at home and drink wine, so that was lots of fun.

Today my boss at Newest Library Job had invited all of us over for lunch at her place, along with partners and families. She and her partner live in Shelford, a small village five minutes away from Cambridge by train. It was a beautiful afternoon, and we sat out in the garden in the autumn sun, watching chickens wandering in and out of the bushes and two colleagues' children throw balls for the dog. Everyone brought a plate of food, and it was massively overcatered, so I suspect a lot of leftovers will show up at work tomorrow. It was great to meet the families of my colleagues, and to introduce them to Matthias (although several people already knew him, given that he also works in the Cambridge library system).

All in all it's been a really relaxing weekend.

Hello to all the new people now following me as a result of the friending meme (and for those of you who haven't seen the meme yet, it's here).

I thought I'd introduce myself to all of you. Feel free to ask me questions about anything.

( Feel free to skip if you've had me in your circle/flist for a while )

Those of you who are friends with me on other social media will know this already, but I wanted to let the LJ/Dreamwidth crowd know my good news as well.

Just over two weeks ago, I interviewed for pretty much my dream job: a full-time senior library assistant post with responsibility for the library's teaching and training programme. You may recall that my work situation was rather complicated: I had three part-time jobs in three different libraries, and, while I didn't talk about it much, the main job of those three was extremely unsatisfying. It was chronicly short-staffed, chaotically managed (as a result of the understaffing), and I was paid two grades lower than my responsibilities would have suggested. I appreciated it as it came along just as my PhD funding stopped, and my coworkers were well-meaning people, but I had been looking for a way out for some time.

In any case, to cut a long story short, I was short-listed for this new job, gave what I thought was a very good interview (and, more than that was just really impressed by the people running this new library, who seemed extremely energetic and competent, which is what I want from colleagues) and then spent a fretful twenty-four hours waiting to hear back.

In case it isn't fairly obvious by now, I got the job!

I'm utterly over the moon about this. I feel rejuvenated and re-inspired about library work (which had been wearing me down and making me feel like I was gradually becoming a very angry person whose empathy was being eroded), I feel enthusiastic about the thought of going to work, and I just feel as if I'm finally going to be able to use my academic teaching experience in a productive way. I got into library work to help people learn, and I care a lot about information literacy, so this job is going to be perfect. I'm thrilled, as you can imagine.

Due to a series of administrative screw ups, I ended up being owed a huge amount of time in lieu, as well as holidays left over from the last academic year, and as a result I'm not going to have to work in my current Main Library Job again. My other two jobs are term-time only, and so from 6pm today onwards, I'm on holiday. It's quite nice to have essentially an entire month off.

2014 has (mostly) been a very kind year to me.