Weeknotes for 2024-06: February 5

Weeknotes are meant to be quick, off-the-cuff reflections on whats happening this week, with a focus on projects and how they are moving forward.

situational

There is a lot happening at work right now that is making the actual work hard to focus on. The politics of post-secondary institutions labour are often painful in a way that is hard to describe, and I won’t try here. It helps to focus on students, who are almost always great. Protecting the real work of education often comes at a cost to that work. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it’s a constant struggle to find the balance. Otherwise you risk waking up one day and finding that you are no longer doing the work you wanted to protect in the first place, or worse, you have become the person who other’s need to protect that work from.

projects

makerspace sustainability

Quickly moving forward on the donation based fiber “bank” which we have renamed the “Community Fabric Stash” after realizing tht a) nobody knew what we were talking about, and b) the bank, e.g. food bank, metaphor was not great.

Cicyetkwu and Sarah have been working on promotion materials for the fabric stash and those should be rolling out this week.

This week I am hoping to connect with a student in trades who will build out some shelves to store materials. Originally we were going to buy shelving, but that does against the sustainability goals, and a student project from Trades will be more interesting/fun/aesthetically-pleasing.

Also planning another Repair Cafe with the wonderful folks at Kamloops Repair Cafe and the TRU Sustainability office. TRU to host Repair Cafe to repair students’ broken items

coyote grant and decolonization

Currently working with Cicyetkwu on an additional welcome event for Indigenous students, this one focused on making drum/shoulder bags. We did one of these last semester and had a Beat Sabor competition and went really well and we’ve seen an increase in Indigenous students using the Makerspace. Cicyetkwu and Melissa organized these and help run them, and honestly, this is work I couldn’t really do myself. We need to find a way to have regular Indigenous student ambassadors who know that community on campus and can bring people into the space.

This week we will hopefully connect with a student artist to run 2 workshops on beading this term. Figuring our appropriate honourariums and timelines, etc. The hope is some staff can also attend.

The other parts of our grant (sponsorship of the Indigenous Culture Club to run workshops in the space, more funding for Indigenous artists) are going to be hard to get done by the end of fiscal year. Hopefully next year we can get the grant earlier.

assessment project

This is the one that I feel the most guilty about. We wrapped up this research almost 10 months ago, and I am still, theoretically, working on a literature review. Actually I’ve done the reading and am now summarizing, but so many things have intervened that i feel very behind. Worse, another librarian and all the library technicians who work in the space helped with this research. I really need to get that started again this week.

links

None this week. Or rather, too many to share and not enough time this morning to parse :)