By Michael Radmacher, Transgender Archives Metadata Librarian
A popular storytelling mechanism begins the story at the end of the tale. But what if the story doesn’t have an ending? This conundrum may be the point of Kula: Library Futures Academy, to be a catalyst for beginnings, not endings. So, for now, let’s buck the storytelling trope and just start with what happened today.
This morning, I had the pleasure of participating in an online collaborative session with the Queerbrarians, a German-speaking network of European LGBTQIA+ professionals who reached out to me because of their interest in our Transgender Archives work at UVic Libraries, supported by UVic’s Chair in Transgender Studies (read more). During the session we compared notes about the current climate in which our work currently exists, we shared stories of our successes and challenges, and we envisioned future collaborations that would support each other’s work.
The grant-funded Trans+ project that I’m currently undertaking at UVic Libraries was of interest to the Queerbrarians in part because of its reliance on community input and guidance. UVic Libraries is committed to the ethical stewardship of its Trans+ collections into an open, accessible, and community-driven future. But how does an institution accomplish this lofty goal, especially in the current climate of suppression, danger, and fear? One answer is to put the community in the driver’s seat through outreach initiatives that centers Trans+ people, not objects.
A tangible deliverable from outreaching to international Queer and Trans+ groups like the Queerbrarians is that it fundamentally strengthens our community networks, an invaluable asset to the success of our work. Having greater access to a transnational network of Queer & Trans+ colleagues and community members, who are willing to be in continuing relation with one another, strengthens not only our individual projects but also our shared resolve to push forward during dark times.
The collaborator who made this new transatlantic connection possible was Lambert Heller, an academic librarian from Hannover, Germany, and the head of the Open Science Lab at TIB who specializes in Open Scholarship. Critical to this story is that Lambert is also KULA’s first International Visiting Fellow.
We now end this brief story at the beginning of the tale. I first met Lambert in summer 2025 in my office at UVic Libraries for an impromptu meet-and-greet chat (read more). My initial impression was that he was an affable fellow who was interested in my work. However, what I did not know at the time was that the casual Kula-initiated meeting marked the genesis of a fruitful relationship that continues to have international impact to this very day.