The 2012 VALA Student Award for a student at RMIT University goes to Blair Gatehouse.
Blair has the highest marks in the three courses that make up the technical courses of the degree:
- Document Management 1
- Document Management 2
- Information Organization
Blair spent the first ten years of his working life working with books – first as a bookseller, and later in a sales role in the publishing industry. In 2010, he decided he wanted a change of career, and enrolled in the Postgraduate Diploma of Information Management at RMIT University. Around the same time he began a role as a Library Officer with Moreland City Libraries. He describes this as a fantastic job that taught him a lot about the demands of working in a very busy library. During this time Blair also worked on a part time basis as a Web Maintainer for the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Collections, finding this to be another great role that gave him really practical web publishing skills.
Just prior to finishing his studies earlier this year, he was successful in gaining a full time job as Lending Services Coordinator at William Angliss Institute. Having been exposed to special collections and archives at the University of Melbourne and William Angliss Institute, Blair now has a keen interest to work in this area in his career. Ideally, he would love to work on a digitisation project – something that would combine his interests of special collections and information management technology.
Blair says that when he is not busy working as a librarian, he loves cooking, brewing his own beer and going out to see live music.
Congratulations, Blair, and good luck!