This is the text and slides from my talk at Everything Open 2026. It's not exactly what I said, partially because I slightly misjudged my timing and had to skip through a section towards the end, but mostly it is as delivered. Video of this talk will be available at some point, when the conference volunteer AV team get to it.
Getting situated - About me
Hello!
Yes, my name is indeed Hugh Rundle. No relation to Guy Rundle or the Rundle Mall. Also no relation to Hugh Jackman or Hugh Grant, though it's nice of you to notice the resemblance.
I want to acknowledge we're on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri land today. I'll be talking this morning about maintaining knowledge systems, making the relationships between things explicit, and maintaining autonomous but connected communities. Nobody in human history has done these things better than the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people here in Canberra, the Wurundjeri where I live in Naarm/Melbourne, or the palawa people of lutruwita/Tasmania where I was born.
I've been working as a librarian for 25 years. I lead a team at La Trobe University that maintains library technology systems with a focus on metadata, collection discovery and maintaining interoperability between many internal and external systems. My work in relation to library metadata is only on the discovery side. I'm not a trained cataloguer and I am not involved in the creation of library metadata.
My hobbies include doing things on computers, and reading books, which is basically what this talk is about.
Getting situated - about you
Who do we have in the room today?
librarians?
... continue reading