Quietly, incrementally, I’ve been sharing things I wrote over the last few years – the experimental outtakes of my first attempt at writing about landscape, an entirely serious paper on records management in sci-fi, the thesis I didn’t want to acknowledge for the better part of two years. I’m happy to be releasing things on my own terms. My first! peer-reviewed! article! is coming out soon in the (open access!) Journal of Radical Librarianship, co-authored with the hyperbrilliant Jane Schmidt, and I hope that every early-career librarian-archivist type has the opportunity to publish with such generous peers who are a little further down the path. We’re presenting it for a second time at the upcoming TRY+ conference, where I am also participating in a panel on the work that cataloguers and collections specialists can engage in to support the recommendations of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. As a cartographic cataloguer who spent much of last week sorting through hundreds of maps representing mining potential on Treaty 3 and Treaty 9 lands, I try and think of all the ways in which I can acknowledge the histories and territories of Indigenous nations, which are generally unrepresented in many of the maps I work with, in my daily work at the library. At night, I wonder how new systems could be built to tell complex and overlapping stories of place.
In any case, I am now choosing to share my work, one piece at a time. Here is something else I wrote last semester, on consent and sharing one’s work with the archive. Continue reading “Deciding when to put yourself out there”
