Yes, sorry. I spent much of November away in Iraq and the Northern Arabian Gulf on a curatorial/collecting visit with some elements of our defence forces. It is the first time the Australian War Memorial has ever sent an archivist/librarian to a war zone and only our second curatorial visit since the Second World War. I took about 2,000 photographs for our collection, gathered a lot of donations, recorded (digitally, using Audacity) about 30 oral history interviews, and identified some records and items we were interested in for our collection (post-deployment).
Since that time I’ve not been entirely sure about what details or images I can actually use in my blog. I certainly didn’t want to compromise the security of any of our forces still deployed overseas. It is a bit frustrating because I think their role and the good work they are doing is not well understood, particularly by the Australian public, but there it is.
Then, in December I heard that I’d won a new job at the University of Technology in Sydney. That too wasn’t public knowledge until more recently, so I couldn’t really say much about it until UTS had made a staff announcement.
It has been a really busy time for me as over the Xmas period I really needed to catalogue all of the photos that I am leaving in our collection and I had to prepare a workshop on the management of digitisation projects and a keynote address for Information Online in Sydney.
I hope to get back to posting more on this blog as things settle down, including me, in Sydney, soon.