Me at 63...

Originally published in Pharos, newsletter of the Professional Historian’s Association (Vic & Tas), October-November 2025, in the ‘Member Profile’ section.

What was your first history related job? What path have you taken since then?

In the early 1990s I started working for a small self-funded organisation called the Australian Science Archives Project. Our mission was to preserve and raise awareness of Australia’s scientific past. When the web came along, we realised it provided an enormous opportunity to communicate history to the public. So I taught myself web development and created the first archives website in Australia. Since then my work has continued to explore what happens when we release GLAM collections into online spaces where people can see and use them differently.

What kind of work have you done? What are you working on now?

I’ve had a range of jobs in the GLAM and university sectors. While ‘history’ wasn’t often in my job title, I’ve always regarded myself as a historian first – whether I was coding, editing, writing, teaching, or managing, history was always the frame through which I understood my work. At the same time, I’ve maintained my own independent practice as a ‘historian and hacker’, developing tools and resources for other researchers, such as the GLAM Workbench. Much of this work is unfunded, but by sharing it openly I’ve created new opportunities for collaboration. For example, I’m currently the ‘Creative Technologist-in-Residence’ at the State Library of Victoria, bringing my years of GLAM hacking to bear on the Library’s place based collections.

Research or writing? (What do you enjoy more and why?)

Researching, or writing, or coding, or teaching, or outreaching (what is the correct verb?) – all have their joys and travails. For me, research is less about finding things in archives and libraries, and more about how we find things in archives and libraries. I poke about in online collections to try and understand how they work, what they reveal, and what they hide. This often leads to the development of new tools, the writing of documentation and blog posts, and sometimes even real, published articles. It’s a process that has consumed my life, for better or worse. Coding often slips into obsession when I have a gnarly problem to crack. Writing is a slog, but there’s nothing like the pleasure of a finely-turned sentence. Teaching is exhausting, but also exhilarating when you see the light bulb of understanding flick on.

What are the best and hardest things about the kind of work you do?

The best thing, the absolute hands-down best thing, is hearing from people who use, or have benefited from the tools and resources that I’ve created. I make things to help researchers see and use GLAM collections in new ways, so finding out what they’ve been doing with my stuff always provides a much-needed jolt of inspiration.

However, the flip side is that getting information about my tools and resources out to the people who might benefit most is hard and often frustrating work. I churn away in the social media mines, but people and organisations seem much more reluctant to share new work these days. There was a time (yeah, the good old days) when GLAM organisations actively engaged with researchers online, sharing the cool things people were doing with their collections. But not now. We all learn through the generosity of others, and I think its important that we find ways to support and enlarge the realm of generosity.