The 2010 VALA Student Award for a student at RMIT University goes to Carrie Thomas.
Carrie is a part time mature-age student who has attained superb results, and has been working part time while studying, managing a home and primary school-aged children. She has achieved consistent High Distinction in all courses at RMIT and has impressed the staff there with her level of commitment and involvement with her cohort. She has excelled in all the technical courses offered, with particularly high marks for Information Organization.
Her previous career was as a paintings conservator, where she worked to preserve the physicality of these cultural objects. However, all cultural collections lose meaning if their information is not cared for, and she chose to study Information Management because she was interested in the way information about museum collections is managed and hoped to change career in this direction. Although the RMIT program is a route to librarianship, she felt that it would also provide her with skills and experience which could be applied more broadly, and she has found that to be so. For example, while studying she has done work experience at the Discovery Centre of the Melbourne Museum, at the Shaw Research Library at the National Gallery of Victoria, at the Picture Collection of the State Library of Victoria and also with Culture Victoria, where she applied Victoria’s Framework of Historic Themes (a simple two level taxonomic structure) to the digital cultural assets on the Culture Victoria website. She now has her first “information management” job, verifying catalogue records at the NGV to ensure the consistency and accuracy of data prior to collection information being added to the public website.
Carrie says that while combining study with family commitments and work experience has been a juggle, she has absolutely loved studying and being introduced to the current information culture after a long absence from formal study. It has opened her mind to many possibilities, and while she hopes to continue to work with heritage collections, this might well take her into libraries or areas such as digital asset management in the future.
Congratulations, Carrie, and good luck!