Finding balance in our life's work...

So, in my last post, I looked a bit at the idea that success comes from being able to make a significant, lasting impact on one's wider professional community, and that quite often this come about through making various commitments outside of work.

This also seemed to be a bit of a recurring theme last year, when I interviewed a number of people who were new graduates back in 2006, which I guess would make them mid-career professionals now. Many of them consider their involvement with ALIA as an important part of their professional development, particularly in volunteering in various groups and advisory committees and conference organising committees. In the past, I've been fortunate enough to have had, at least on one occasion, a workplace that has supported me in my professional involvement, but by and large, most of us need to spend our "ALIA time" outside of the workplace.

And even if we're not the ones tirelessly organising events, drafting discussion papers, or coordinating advocacy programs, there's the hope that enough professionals will come on board - enough just to show up to an evening event, or write one blog post a month. Without attracting a critical mass of peers participants, it can feel like a thankless and futile task. And yet, even that absolute minimum amount of professional engagement - enough to get your PD points - can be a lot to to ask of the average person.

Which (finally) brings me to the month's theme - Balance. I'm not going to call it a "work/life balance", because it's a lot more complicated than that. For many of us, our work is what motivates us in other areas of life, and our personal lives can often take more work than our paid employment. Depending on one's personal situation, you might be juggling a combination of the following:

• Work - be it full-time, part-time, or multiple jobs, depending on which of the following you're also trying to balance;
• Family - you might be a carer to some capacity, or just have familiar expectations to spend time with your relatives;
• Relationships - they don't magically look after themselves... they take time and energy;
• Studies - some of you are crazy enough to go back for more, and I know better that to ask anybody how their PhD is going;
• Health - doing regular exercise, buying groceries and cooking healthy meals. Yep, that's a thing that's important, but most of us don't find enough time to do it properly.
• Creative hobbies - whether it's dancing, crafting, writing, learning a language or a musical instrument, there's enough evidence out there to show that plenty of this will keep your brain in good shape.
• Socio-political engagement - At the very least, there's a whole lot of emotional labour involved here, in trying to engage with your peers in improving our society, let alone getting actively involved in advocacy campaigning on socio-political issues.

Now, for many of us, all of the above are going to be higher on our priority list than Professional Involvement, and I daresay that many of us struggle to find the time to maintain a balanced ratio of engagement with some of these aspects of life without neglecting others.

To be honest, sometimes it's all I can do just to work all day, go home, cook some quick-and-dirty noodles for dinner, and read a chapter of a book, before falling asleep by 10pm.

So, on top of that, working on a professional committee, and using all your annual leave to self-fund and attend conferences to present a paper that you researched and wrote in your own time? It's pretty crazy and exhausting, and when I lay it all out like this, I don't know why anybody would choose this life. And yet, some of us do it again and again.

When I self-funded my trip to IFLA in Poland a few months ago, I was often asked, "Why would you spend your own time and money going to IFLA?" My response was quite simple - for some time, I've wanted to go to an IFLA conference, and I've also wanted to visit Poland. This seemed like a good opportunity to do both at once. For me, that's where the importance of balance lies - not in juggling a bunch of different unrelated things, but in finding intersections between these aspects of my life, and engaging there.

I work in a place that is highly engaged in culture and technology, with a good team of peers who are intelligent, sociable and supportive. I'm able to ride my bike to and from work, and live in a city where it's relatively easy to find and participate in cultural activities. Of course, it's not seamless - it still takes work, and this is where I'm still trying to figure out the missing piece - professional involvement.

Compared with other Australian cities I've lived in, Canberra has a relatively small number of people who are actively involved in their professional community. Part of me wonders whether this is because there isn't yet a "critical mass" of active professionals, like in other cities, or whether Canberra living isn't compatible with including professional involvement as part of a balanced lifestyle.

Part of the solution, of course, is to get employers to encourage their staff to at least participate in the wider professional community, both on a professional and social level. Again, balance. After all, I've often found that in the past, the most successful professional events that I've attended, are the ones where everybody has also gelled socially. (The ones where everybody is out the door the moment the final presenter finishes speaking - not so much.)

Once you get a bunch of people together who get along well socially, have exciting and fresh ideas, and trust each other to be able to successfully make it a reality - that's where the magic happens!

Life before libraries...

I feel like I've already spoken / written at length about the winding sometimes-exciting, sometimes-frustrating path that I've taken in the past eleven-ish years. I feel like any success over this time can be attributed to either being in the right place at the right time or (when I wasn't so lucky) taking a leap into the unknown and hoping for the best.

But it's easy to forget that there were twenty-something years of my life prior to getting my first library job, and they were certainly formative years in terms of setting me on my current path. So, that's what I want to explore today - after all, we are talking about Origin Stories this month.

I didn't always want to become a librarian. I'm pretty sure that option never crossed my mind during my childhood. To be honest, I don't think I ever really knew what I wanted to be, growing up. I think I figured that I'd just do as well as I could in high school and see where that got me. I probably would have done better if I didn't spend so much time arranging music, hanging out in the drama room, or spending late nights dialling in to Bulletin Board Systems (these were the days before the Internet, after all). But I graduated with good enough marks to get into an Arts / Engineering double-degree course at Melbourne Uni, so that seemed a good idea at the time.

A couple of years later, I dropped out of the Engineering degree - strangely enough, there was so much more maths involved than I really cared for, and I was far too busy managing several student clubs, performing in theatre productions, and otherwise hanging out with role-players and re-watching Labyrinth, Willow, and episodes of Red Dwarf for the gazillionth time. My first paid job was a casual position working for the university's School's Liaison Unit, talking to visiting school groups about how awesome student life was at Melbourne Uni.

These activities grew into bigger things. I became heavily involved in student arts, and in my next paid gig, I was the Communications Officer for MUDfest, a biennial festival of the arts. Also, every summer, I would volunteer my time developing learning activities for a VCE Summer School which was delivered to students from underprivileged backgrounds, and eventually I was paid to co-run the whole program. At the same time, I picked up ongoing casual work, sitting at the front desk of a computer lab in the Baillieu library, helping students connect to the wifi, figure out the printing system, look up journal articles on databases, and show academics how to use EndNote.

Plus my academic life was picking up again - I'd discovered the Classics and English Literature departments, and one of my favourite subjects was medieval paleography and codicology, where my lecturer had developed state of the art software for reading digitised medieval manuscripts. It was awesome.

In hindsight, it seems so obvious that I'd become a librarian. Not the traditional sort which was still prevalent back then, but the kind that we talk about now. But it hadn't crossed my mind yet. I had more interesting things to do than to put books on shelves.

Eventually, in 2004, I graduated and was forced to go out into the real world. I still had my library computer lab job, and my younger friends at uni, but I couldn't stay there forever, and they would graduate soon enough. My problem was, I still didn't know what to do with my life - other than all the cool, interesting and rewarding things I'd been doing as a student. I eventually brainstormed a whole lot of vocational fields, based on my skills and interests, and the top three options (in no particular order) were:

- Secondary Education
- Arts Administration
- Librarianship / Information Management

I seriously considered going into teaching - even though I (correctly) had my doubts as to whether I'd be a good school teacher. Similarly, I would have loved to have gone into the Arts sector and worked at a fringe or writers festival, but the pragmatist in me felt that it wasn't really a sustainable option. Libraries, on the other hand - now *there* was a solid investment in my future! After all, there are so many kinds of libraries - it couldn't be that competitive to get in, right? The course could be done online, and fees were subsidised by the government. Plus I kinda had a bit of relevant knowledge and experience, with my computer lab work and English Literature degree.

So, I signed up, and quickly found some part-time volunteer work assisting the librarian in a small disability non-profit organisation. By the end of that year, I was invited to an interview that would become my first full-time job as a library officer in a public library. The rest, as they say, is history.

I never set out to become a librarian, but now that I look back, it's felt like an inevitable destination. It's extraordinary how well this field has suited my range of interests - a combination of culture, technology, learning, community-building, social justice - in ways that I couldn't have predicted at the time.

And, I mean, really? Me, an engineer? At least if I screw up something in the library, the ensuing damage would be limited...

Playing it safe...

We work in a risk-averse profession.

We learn to play it safe - whether it be in providing access to collections or making copies of materials... whether in committing resources to innovative services or trialling programs that are completely out of the circle we exist in.

Sure, there are the trailblazers who we all admire at conferences, but once the inspiration and associated endorphins wear away, we return to work - back to the safe old familiar surroundings.

And then there are times where we adopt new, exciting innovations - usually in the form of a software platform that an external vendor has developed, and done all the required risk analyses and beta-testing - and preferably one that another library has already used, so that we have an working example to observe first.

Of course, this all makes sense. We need to be accountable for our actions, decisions and the consequences that follow.

On the other hand, one of the core values of librarianship is defending and promoting Freedom of Expression as a fundamental human right.

Exercising one's freedom of expression is not safe. I've lived in countries where people aren't able to express themselves freely, because to do so would make them physically unsafe. Even here in Australia, there are many who cannot express a political opinion online without the consequence being a torrent of abuse - much of which involves threats or physical harm.

We see it happen to others and yet we remain silent, lest we become a target ourselves.

And of course, many of us are public servants, and have to choose our words carefully, in case we're perceived as being critical of the government employers and put our employment - and financial security - at risk.

We demand to have the right to be safe, but also the right to freedom of expression - even though, in practice, these two freedoms rarely coexist peacefully.

So, what's the solution? Continue to play it safe, keep our heads down, work hard, achieve results and get along with our colleagues, so that we can enjoy a safe and stimulating career? Or strive to be a revolutionary, railing against the systemic social biases and pushing for more equitably accessible services, build teams and collections that are more representative of our communities... and risk the inevitable push-back, whether it be those who would decry your actions with words such as "social justice warrior", "political correctness" or "playing identity politics", or, worse still, silent passive-aggression.

Or is this a false dichotomy?

Is it perhaps possible to be progressively outspoken and still play it safe?

Is it possible, as champions for intellectual freedom, to facilitate safe forums for the exploration of highly-contentious issues without the fear of some form or retribution? Or is this nothing more than preaching to the choir, tweeting outrage into our own homophilic echo-chambers, and avoiding real discourse - however dangerous - with those whose mindsets are truly opposite to ours.

I don't have the answers. Sometimes I feel emboldened and inspired to try to push for social change, but sometimes I feel exhausted enough just trying to stay on top of my professional work and maintain the professional relations I need with my peers. I know many people who keep these two parts of their lives completely separate - and that is, in itself, a way of playing it safe. But just as the personal is the political, so too is the professional.