What was newCardigan?

In June 2015 I was having a few drinks with some former colleagues at a bar in Melbourne. I had recently started working at a library service on the other side of the city, and I wasn't the only one at that bar looking for a change. We were ambitious professionals who felt that the library profession generally – and the local scene in particular – was lethargic, boring, and lacking ambition. We complained that ALIA no longer had any interest in us since we had grown out of being shiny "new graduates" but were not yet seasoned veterans worthy of lifetime service pins. We bemoaned the lack of local events to connect outside of formal conferences.

It was a typical whingefest from a group of jaded mid-career professionals. This sort of thing happens every Friday night in every large city. Was the criticism of ALIA fair? Was our synopsis of the state of librarianship accurate? I think ...probably. But it also doesn't really matter. Because the important thing that came out of that tipsy discussion at a noisy bar was the determination to change the situation ourselves. To do something.

This was the birth of newCardigan.

A meetup

But what exactly was newCardigan? From the beginning it was a little vague. Initially the most tangible evidence was merely a Twitter account. We had a fairly good idea of what we wanted to experience, but only loose ideas about how to organise ourselves. And "loosely" was also the operative word on that front. The initial concept was based on a mash-up of tech industry "meetups" I had attended and "Drinking About Museums" events I had read about – one or two talks from professionals about something they were working on or thinking about, followed by drinks at a pub or bar. After a while this morphed into "tours" of venues, but the basic idea of professional discussion + drinks carried through all our events from start to finish.

Despite being started by librarians exclusively (or perhaps because it was started by librarians, at a particular time when GLAM was in vogue), newCardigan was always positioned as a "GLAM" organisation. This got a huge boost when Nik McGrath, the archivist at Melbourne Museum, joined the organising team. Nik's boundless enthusiasm and deep network of archivists and museum people opened up opportunities to connect GLAM workers from across Melbourne and beyond.

But this is all just a description of logistics and reach. It doesn't, by itself, explain why so many people were excited about newCardigan in a way rarely expressed in relation to formal professional associations. For that, we need to explore what newCardigan did inside people's heads.

A complaint

newCardigan was essentially a reaction against what we felt was a stuffy, self-important and overpriced culture of professional development and professional representation. Conference tickets were expensive and usually only available to more senior staff. The rare local events that associations ran tended to come with a steep ticket price and a few cliques that you and I weren't in. And trying to organise anything else through those associations felt like running into a brick wall of bureacracy.

We figured we knew how to run events (since many of us did this every week in our workplaces) and we may as well organise things ourselves directly. Being unfettered by any requirement to represent all views in the sectors, we could organise speakers and discussions that were much more direct in criticising practices we felt were harmful. Ideas around institutional neutrality, or the reluctance to account for our insitutions' historical and ongoing participation in cultural violence against Indigenous people and communities.

The lack of formality was deliberate. From the first year our tag-line was "JFDI". We wanted to cut through the management-by-five-subcommittees culture of our organisations, and also encourage ourselves to stop overthinking how to run things. To our surprise it turned out to be extremely easy to talk our way in to free after-hours tours of GLAM institutions. GLAM professionals love to infodump to their colleagues – who knew?

An introduction

For many newly-minted graduates, newCardigan was the first place they met people working in the profession – whether that profession was librarianship, archiving, record-keeping, curation, or some other GLAM-related field. It was also a place to learn about what people in those professions actually do. "GLAM" is usually a fairly nebulous, somewhat aspirational term. It's something peak bodies talk about when lobbying for funds, associations talk about when trying to attract more people to their conferences, and software developers talk about when aggregating the different kinds of cultural collections they can search with API calls.

newCardigan took a bottom-up approach to GLAM. Instead of discussing it conceptually, we just tried to ensure we had a mix of events and guests from across the professions, talking about what they do. Inevitably it leaned heavily towards libraries, but we still provided an opportunity to understand each other a little better across the sectors.

The social aspect was important here as well. Graduates and students trying to find their place could ask more experienced people for advice over dinner and drinks. Connections were made across institutions. It was surprising how many cardiParties were organised through a quick chat with a participant at a previous event. Some people travelled interstate just to come to one of our Friday-night events to connect with their people.

A punk scene

Mostly we just wanted to hang out and learn about cool new GLAM stuff. We didn't consciously set out to create a GLAM punk scene , and for quite a while I didn't realise that's what we were doing. It had to be explicitly pointed out to me – it had just kind of happened.

newCardigan came to hold a peculiar space within GLAM generally, and probably the library profession in particular. We were the GLAM punks who drew in anarchist GLAM-enthusiasts to our events. But we were also the important networking opportunity that LIS course coordinators encouraged their students to join. People attending our events asked for certificates to prove their professional development hours. newCardigan didn't want to be just another part of Official GLAM, or indeed to be any part of Official GLAM. But official GLAM wanted us to be, somehow, part of it.

Social activists and senior library managers alike would enquire about how newCardigan was faring when I bumped into them. One one level it was just a few dozen people hanging out regularly in Melbourne and – for several years under the leadership of Andrew Kelly – in Perth. But on another level it was a force that animated far more than that.

A signal

It was consciously not a representative or official organisation and made no claims to compete with them. Yet it was this very independence that allowed us to speak on behalf of the collective at certain points. newCardigan made public statements in support of both Marriage Equality and the Indigenous Voice to Parliament when our professional associations were either silent or making mealy-mouthed statements about civility and "both sides". I won't over-claim that newCardigan forced significant or specific changes within GLAM generally and librarianship in particular. But newCardigan's very existence was a signal. Whether that signal served as a warning or as a beacon depended on one's perspective. Either way it couldn't be ignored.

The various people who worked on the organising group, spent hours editing podcast episodes (thankyou Clare!), and chased up potential venues and speakers did it because we loved what it meant for the community we built. But after eleven years, newCardigan itself has run out of puff. Covid changed many things including norms around ad-hoc venue visits, working arrangements, and enthusiasm for large social events generally. Lots of people wanted newCardigan to continue; after a while nobody really wanted to run it. Earlier this week we formally agreed to wind it up.

An inspiration

The spirit of newCardigan will live on. Via email or in person many people have expressed to me in the last month how important newCardigan was for them and their understanding of what is possible in the GLAM professions. cardiParties were the place students came for a sense of community when online study wasn't cutting it. cardiCast was where librarians discovered a whole other world of collection management questions listening to archivists or museum curators and preparators. Our newsletter connected GLAM workers to what was happening in other parts of Australia and the world. We brought people together in Melbourne, Ballarat, Perth, Sydney and Sale. We recorded podcasts about a Golden Chiko Roll in Wagga Wagga and refugee libraries in Greece. We were welcomed by Directors through the front door. We were let in by deputy branch managers through the back door. We interviewed University Librarians and Professors. We interviewed volunteer seed library founders and part-time customer service officers. We ran events at esteemed institutions where Australia's elites love to be seen. We ran events at scrappy activist libraries that were probably in breach of fire regulations. newCardigan was large. It contained multitudes.

May a thousand flowers bloom from its memory.

---