Canva Chaos & Cornet Parts
There are currently far too many tabs open in my browser.
Some contain carefully organized documentation about researcher profiles, ORCID connections, and metadata workflows. Others contain seventeen slightly different poster drafts because I suddenly decided the typography “wasn’t giving enough 1950s print shop energy.” Somewhere in between are maps of Cornwall, Ontario land records, old militia references, and at least one search for obscure United Empire Loyalist family connections at one o’clock in the morning.
This is apparently my natural habitat now.
The past little while has been a curious and rather wonderful mix of librarian work, creative experimentation, music rehearsals, genealogy rabbit holes, and increasingly elaborate Canva projects. I seem to be moving constantly between structured systems and deeply human stories — which, now that I think about it, may actually describe most of my interests.
At work, I’ve been heavily immersed in supporting Western’s implementation of Symplectic Elements and helping faculty navigate researcher profiles, publication metadata, ORCID integration, and the many strange little pathways scholarly information travels through online systems. A surprising amount of the work involves untangling identities — helping people reconnect publications published under different names, understanding how databases harvest information, or figuring out why one article appears correctly in one system but not another.
I genuinely enjoy the detective work of it all.
Metadata work often sounds dry when described out loud, but at its core it is really about people, stories, attribution, and connection. It is about making sure scholars can actually be found, recognized, and understood across a sprawling digital ecosystem that is often messier than most people realize.
At the same time, I’ve been deep in poster design mode for our initiative attempting to build momentum toward a Book Arts Lab before the lab itself exists. There’s something delightfully scrappy about that. We are building workshops, collaborations, and small experiments first: proving the value of tactil, creative, hands-on scholarly work before there is a permanent physical space attached to it.
Somewhere along the line, I appear to have become emotionally invested in decorative flourishes, paper textures, faux letterpress aesthetics, and whether a title block properly evokes “mid-century academic newspaper.” I regret nothing.
The posters themselves have started to reflect the broader ideas behind the project: the blending of analogue and digital worlds, the importance of slow creative work, and the belief that libraries can still be places of making as well as collecting. In a university environment increasingly shaped by dashboards, metrics, and screens, there is something deeply appealing about paper, ink, thread, scissors, and collaborative making.
Not everything meaningful needs to be optimized.
Musically, things have also been wonderfully busy. I’ve been rehearsing and performing with The Jazzabelles, Sounds of Swing, the London Concert Band,and Barclay Road Brassworks, which continue to bring enormous joy into my life. There is something grounding about ensemble playing right now. So much modern work happens alone and asynchronously through screens and messages and notifications. Rehearsals are the opposite of that. You arrive in a room together, listen carefully, breathe together, and make something beautiful, collectively in real time.
Jazz also continues to keep me humble. There are few experiences quite like counting rests while quietly panicking about an exposed trumpet entrance.
And threaded through all of this has been genealogy research, which increasingly feels less like a hobby and more like an ongoing historical investigation board covered in maps, timelines, DNA matches, land records, militia rolls, and tiny fragments of evidence scattered across Ontario and Cornwall. I’ve been digging more deeply into my Tinney family lines, chasing possible United Empire Loyalist connections, trying to untangle migration stories, and attempting to understand how ordinary families moved through the complicated realities of early Canadian history.
Genealogy and metadata work actually have far more in common than most people would think. Both involve identity, attribution, evidence, uncertainty, missing records, variant spellings, and the constant challenge of connecting scattered fragments into coherent stories. Both require patience. Both reward curiosity. Both occasionally lead to muttering at your computer screen over one inconsistent date from 1847.
And in the middle of all this wonderful chaos, the kids gave me two beautiful Hudson’s Bay striped beach towels for Mother’s Day.
They make me want to sit beside a lake with a stack of archival notes, an iced coffee, and absolutely no email notifications whatsoever.
Honestly, that sounds pretty perfect.
— BiblioJo